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This chap does some brilliant reviews on video, take a look at some of them, he does FAQ's and a good beginners guide http://www.techmoan.com/ Kingo

So, I removed the starter yesterday and replaced it with a second hand starter bought for €40 and this seems to have sorted the problem for now. I intend to get the replacement parts for the old starter and recondition it myself as the second hand starter is also 15 odd years old and could fail at anytime. Thanks for reply Konrad.

I've been a VW owner since I learned to drive, but the reliability issues I've had with the last few ive owned has been ridiculous. I picked up the red Auris 1.4D Icon for my wife a year ago, there's not even been a squeak or rattle from it. Now got rid of my mk6 Golf (money pit), and now own the blue Auris 1.4D Icon Plus.

The gap must be between 1.0 and 1.1 mm or 0,039 ... 0,043 inch.

For this analysis I am modelling the battery blocks as ideal lossless batteries in series with a resistor equal to the series resistance reported by Torque Pro. The blue line is for the 0.024ohm series resistance per block reported on my newish (8000 mile) Auris. 100A seems to be the maximum regenerative braking current possible, as seen from the log. That must correspond to the charge indicator on the console being at maximum. The battery is charged linearly by current, but the resistive loss increase as the square of the current. That means the charge or discharge efficiency drops off as the current increases. It is therefore apparent that if you only brake to 50% of the maximum regenerative capability you get more efficient regeneration. However, on a new battery the change from 87% to 93% is not that great. On the other hand if the battery is old and cold, and the series resistance has gone up to 0.100 ohms, the efficiency improves from 61% to 75%. I don’t (yet) have any information on how the series resistance changes with time and temperature but this should be a major loss mechanism within the hybrid system. There are other losses of course Motor/generator lossInverter loss.Galvanic efficiency loss in battery (1 Ah in doesn’t give 1 Ah out)It’s hard to imagine the motor/generators being better than 95% efficient, and the same goes for the inverters. That being the case the overall efficiency for stop start driving must be pretty horrible and therefore nothing for the manufacturer(s) to shout about. generator to inverter 95% inverter to battery 95% into battery 87% from battery 87% galvanic efficiency 95% battery to driver 95% driver to motor 95% That lot amounts to at best 58% restoration of the kinetic energy when braking and re-accelerating on a vehicle in newish condition. These efficiency values are not going to be readily obtainable; all we really experience are the mpg figures. (I have attached the (evil) Excel spreadsheet so you can check my method/calculations if interested. It is ZIP'ed because this website apparenty agrees that Excel spreadsheets are evil!) seriesR.zip

I have been looking at my recent trip log to see what information can be gleaned from it. Since battery condition is a topic of interest I wanted to verify the PID which gives the max-min block voltages. This is easy to do in an Excel spreadsheet as we have all the individual block voltages and we just need an extra column to calculate the max-min value from the 14 blocks. I had assumed (falsely) that the two values would be equal to the millivolt level. In fact the attached graph shows that they are wildly different. The way I am interpreting/understanding this response is as follows … A low cost measurement system would not sample all blocks simultaneously. It would use a multiplexer (selector) on the front of the acquisition devices (analog to digital converter) and would step through the banks one at a time. This means that the banks are not measured at the same instant in time and therefore the bank voltages will differ from each other during large transient current events. From the log it is clear that the current is changing by as much as 100A between successive readings and that constitutes a pretty serious transient! The bottom line is that the built-in block difference reading is suspect during fast transient currents. We want to only see valid block difference readings. Alessandro is looking to see how many samples the block voltage is different for. I am approaching the problem in a slightly different way. I am comparing each block voltage to the instantaneous average of all block voltages (the average across all 14 blocks for one row in the log file). This gives less excessive excursions, which to my mind are more representative. Additionally, I have filtered the difference values by averaging the present reading with the immediately preceding value (a rolling average of 2 points). If a cell is damaged or weak it should be weak on both charge and discharge, so the max and min value (magnitudes) should be fairly equal. And they are mostly, the asymmetry probably being due to this non-simultaneous sampling issue. Averaging the absolute values of the deviations should give a robust consistent metric. This looks good on my (newish, good) battery. The real test would be to try it on known bad battery data sets.

Mr Llewellyn summed this up years ago on his first Fullycharged Show video. If a manufacturer doesn't really want a product to succeed they overprice it and give it half hearted marketing. Just watch from 6.35 to 7.25 for an explanation. i trend to agree.