Well, I got borred today and decided to drop in the little 13 AH Hawker battery I bought off of eBay. As a preface there has been some discussion to this issue in the past on Honda-Hybrids as to how this little AGM battery would probably fare better under the Insight's constand float charge on the 12 volt battery. My Insight is about a year and a half old according to carfax, but the first entry was at 800 miles so I'm going to assume it was a demo car for a while so my best guess is it's about 2 years old from the date of production. Anyways, nothing was wrong with my origonal Furukawa battery, I just had the hawker there and decided what the heck. So I went off to batteries plus to see if they had the automotive terminal adaptors. Sure enough they did, $10 which isn't bad considering the only ones I could find online would have been like $20 after shipping. Here is the Furukawa next to the Hawker:
As you can see the Hawker is a lot smaller than the origonal so I made some spacers out of a large sheet of 1/2" MDF I had left over from making my speaker box. Each one is 6 3/4" X 4 3/4". The top one had to be sanded down some as it is just slightly less than 3 inches shorter.
Here it is in the car hooked up. The posts are technically in the wrong place for the Insight, but the little battery is so short that turning it around presents no problem, the battery cables reach with no problem. Note the cool copper terminals. Also, I was initially concerned about the battery wanting to slide, but there is more than enough pressure from the factory hold down to hold it in place very well.
Now I can't wait to see the ever more increased "thats the battery" remark. I think it's more fitting for this car to have a higher tech 12 volt battery. The first thing I did to was to pull the IMA fuse and make sure the car would crank over on the starter motor. Sure enough it did without hesitation. Total cost of this project was about $35, $25 for the battery off ebay and $10 for the terminals. I did not modify a thing on the car to do this project either which is always a plus.

As you can see the Hawker is a lot smaller than the origonal so I made some spacers out of a large sheet of 1/2" MDF I had left over from making my speaker box. Each one is 6 3/4" X 4 3/4". The top one had to be sanded down some as it is just slightly less than 3 inches shorter.

Here it is in the car hooked up. The posts are technically in the wrong place for the Insight, but the little battery is so short that turning it around presents no problem, the battery cables reach with no problem. Note the cool copper terminals. Also, I was initially concerned about the battery wanting to slide, but there is more than enough pressure from the factory hold down to hold it in place very well.

Now I can't wait to see the ever more increased "thats the battery" remark. I think it's more fitting for this car to have a higher tech 12 volt battery. The first thing I did to was to pull the IMA fuse and make sure the car would crank over on the starter motor. Sure enough it did without hesitation. Total cost of this project was about $35, $25 for the battery off ebay and $10 for the terminals. I did not modify a thing on the car to do this project either which is always a plus.