have a 2007 civic hybrid with 85k miles bought new and live in a hilly area. Bought a new Prius and getting ready to sell the civic when I noticed IMA issues on the dash volt meter. When it sat for a couple of days, guage showed 2-3 bars then green charge for maybe a mile and wham full guage then after couple of miles down to half or so ..few more miles down to 1-2 bars with charging and never get back to a full charge. So at this point think battery is going bad? No error codes or IMA light just erattic guage. Any ideas??? Of course here in Oregon warrenty is 8yrs or 80k miles

 

Check out 99mpg.com Mike Dibrowski is building grid chargers and selling them for a very small profit. He has found that one or two cells fall below the rest and the battery module has trouble regulating the pack. By equalizing the pack with a grid charger you might be able to save the pack. He talks about it on what drives us podcast episode 86. Best of luck.

 

I have a 2006 Civic Hybrid and it's battery indicator is erratic also. I typically start out with 3 bars. Then it drops to 2 and then within a few mins goes to 4 or 5. After about 15 mins I get 6 or 7 bars. On rare occasions I do get 8. My average fuel consumption is 6 l/100km or around 39 mpg. It's part city and part highway driving.

 

I'm having a similar issue. Dropped the car off yesterday with the dealer to see what they find.

 

So, just curious did the dealer find anything?

I'm starting to experience similar symptoms to the above (wild battery swings, use of the regular starter more frequently etc) and was wondering that kind of reception I would get at the dealer.

 

The dealer found no codes and updated the firmware in the car thinking it would fix it. It did not. I brought it back with a print out of Farwestmx comments above and told them that THIS was happening. They said Honda would not replace the battery without codes but the dealer appealed to their regional manager and he approved the replacement. Got a new battery under warrantee for free. They never exactly said what was wrong...but it didn't matter to me. Good luck to all.

I have a 2008 Civic hybrid with ~38,000 miles on it.

 

My 08 Civic Battery died at 49,000 miles. The IMA light came on, and I took it to the dealer, who installed a new hybrid battery and new software, free gratis. The dealer told me that cars that were oprated in hot weather wih the C on in stop and go were experiencing premature battery failure, especially when parked for long stretches without being operated (which describes my civics driving history to a T) They said the new software should solve the problem, and extended the warranty on the Hybrid Battery.

 

The dealer finally agreed to replace the battery even though it didn't trigger any codes. They said it's capacity was 17%. Now the car runs properly although the autostop only works occasionally. I'm guessing that's the new software. My vehicle is at almost 195,000 km. The fuel economy I get now is around 6l/100km or 39 mpg. It's still not stellar but better than it was.