Gut it

[nonicknamebrian]

Hi everyone,

I just discovered the Insight this morning (via your phenomenal site) and thanks to IC.net have been utterly unproductive at work all day! I am bewitched and have spent most of the day trolling your forums answering almost all of my (very many) questions.

The only remaining nagger that I haven't seemed to have found addressed anywhere (and I think like I have performed a pretty comprehensive search+scan...) is about a batteryless Insight.

I'm a 25-year-old IT professional so I'm not exactly rolling in it yet. The Insight appeals to every instinct I have; it's simple and purposeful, minimalist, and most importantly it's high-tech edge on the world.

That said, an Insight living in a dealership does very little good to me. They're 30K with tax in Canada, which coincidentally is roughly my net annual salary. (The only thing worse than our 14% sales tax is our up to 49% income tax... but that's another story...)

Anyway until now I've looked at SMART cars (available here in Canada but too minimalist to be an only car,) Echo Hatchbacks (not "techy" enough for me, plus being in IT encourages celibacy enough as it is,) and TDI VW's (apparently the door handles fall off if you look at them sideways, then the VeeDub warranty department calls it wear-and-tear and you pay $1500...)

The Insight, on the other hand, fits the bill almost perfectly. And while all of it's amazing attributes that are so well documented here, there are two exceptions to its' amazingness that I can see: price and "true" Honda-style longevity.

To get around price I can buy used; great. But replacing the battery for a couple of grand every 80-120k miles leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I take ritual care of machines, I drive very slowly in anything with 4 wheels, and enduring the initial price of a Honda will only make sense to me if I get 300 000+ mostly worry-free miles out of it. Having to think about wearing out a battery every time I touch the gas or regen would drive the obsessive-compulsive in me bonkers.

Plus I live in a climate and topography that will wreak havoc on a battery -- I've had to thaw out radiators filled with -40 antifreeze more than once. I also spend my fun time in the mountains, which means climbing from sea-level to 4000 feet in 2 hours, then going from pass-to-valley-to-pass until any battery that's trying to push actually returns to the individual elemental states from whence its' ancestors were wrought.

So the perfect car for me is an Insight, minus IMA. Gutless suits me fine, 50MPG suits me fine, and knowing I won't have to think about it for a decade would be the only incentive that would ever push me into parting with up to 20 large.

Can it be done? I think that the first model-year Insights must be toasting their packs and either pissing off their owners or getting traded in for peanuts right about now. Can I pick up a used, higher-mileage Insight where the pack is on the fritz, strip all the weighty IMA detritus, and have a 1600lb, never-quit, 1L motor, aluminum, set-it-and-forget-it Honda?

Or are all the Insightisti tracing my IP to my house and gathering up the pitchforks?

Thanks for any advice or direction to previous posts.

Brian[/i]

[Insightful Trekker]

An oldie, but a goodie:

http://www.insightcentral.net/forum/vie ... php?t=1460

HTH!

Now get back to work so you can afford an Insight :P

[nonicknamebrian]

I did indeed read that post... it seemed to me that simply disconnecting 144 Volt pack would allow the car's electro-brain to continue to charge the 12V, yielding a perfectly-operational non-IMA car.

Refuters? Anyone dared try it?

Is this not the state that the car is in when the pack goes dead, with the exception that sensing a pack in there it will do a bunch of recals?

thanks,
Brian

[Insightful Trekker]

Easy enough to shut down the 144v pack via its circuit breaker and verify the DC-DC converters output by watching current flow at a battery terminal under various loads and engine RPM's.

Ok, you dared me. I'll report tomorrow.

[nonicknamebrian]

Awesome! I can't wait for the results...

If I can run an Insight in all-mechanical mode, I'll drive it down and buy you a beer! (And the beer will cost more than the gas...)

BTW the other idea I had was to run two packs in parallel -- effectively doubling the life I would think. (I "would" also be a guy who doesn't know anything about electricity.)

Would two packs in parallel not make a 144V battery with twice the reserves and half the rate of discharge?

Or am I making that up?

thanks,
Brian

PS Aah; I get it! I order the MIMA board, and then I'll be able to manage my battery's life manually. I'll only use it when I'm merging, and the rest of the time I'll just cruise to 300 000 in mechanical bliss...

[Dougie]

I suspect that the Honda Fit engine and drivetrain will fit in the Insight. No facts to go on, but it seems reasonable... Strip out the IMA stuff and put in a 1200 cc engine and you'll have a real hot rod...

[b1shmu63]

Brian, I gather you are living in western Canada. Yup, extended periods sitting in the heat will shorten the life of any battery. Yup, draining the battery flat on a daily basis will shorten the life of the battery too. However, you may have a tough time finding an Insught in Canada with a fried battery.

There are posts about mountain climbing in the Insight too. Just stay in second or third gear and keep the revs up. Third, fourth, and fifth are all overdrives if I remember correctly. Someone on this site recently bought an Insight with a fried pack and was driving it around for a while before they figured it out. The car was starting on the 12 volt starter. Honda replaced the pack under warranty. Some have 250,000 miles on the original pack. Sorry I don't have links for these topics. Probably you can use the search feature.

If you want the engine to last forever you can use 0W30 synthetic like me, and still get great mileage.

[nonicknamebrian]

250 000 miles on the original components? Wow. That's the kind of Honda I'm used to. I live in Vancouver which has an ideal climate, but I commute to my hometown of Calgary which involves tens of thousands of feet of climbing and descending, in anything from +40 to -40... as does skiing etc to a lesser extent.

It sounds like the Canadian Insights fare alright, though, being out of the heat? Just let'r rev and keep the A/C on for the battery's sake I guess? (I note that Honda Canada doesn't give you a no-AC option...)

I guess that the mileage-related posts I read were the squeaky wheels; not those with lots of trouble-free miles. Talk about a biased sample population.

Hopefully I'll be posting next as an owner rather than as a dreamer.

Thanks for the insight!

...woah okay time for bed

[james]

I wouldn't worry too much about the battery being affected by cold. Heat seems to be a much bigger issue. And as you've probably read in old threads, I don't have much problem with regular climbs from 4500 to 8900 ft. I would like a little more power, but I've said that of every car (and motorcycle) I've owned.

As for battery replacement when it gets beyond the 80K Honda warranty, you might look in some of the MIMA threads about the possibility of building either higher capacity packs, or cheap replacement ones, out of salvaged Prius cells. Soon as Mike gets MIMA finished...

[Aaron Cake]

You can't really just remove the IMA battery. It's a totally integrated part of the electrical system. Doing so would freak out the BCM, MCM, DC-DC and PCM/ECM. Remember that the 144V system is the source of all 12V power in the car.

MIMA is the best choice if you want to minimize battery use, but honestly, an Insight without assist is dangerously slow. Found this out VERY quickly when my LAF sensor failed, thus cutting all assist. Talk about gutless. A Metro on 1 cylinder is faster...

That said, I currently have 118K on the odometer with no indications that the battery is suffering at all.

Where in Canada are you?