quick story long got a call from a dealer advising me that my battery has failed some threshold test and the mechanic is advising that it won't make it through the winter. Battery/car is coming up on 4 years but it has never giving me any issues starting/cranking. is this a valid threshold test and should i get a new battery or should i hold off until i actually see symptoms of a dying battery?
depends if you have jumper cables and if mind possibly being stranded sometime this winter. It probably has some more life in it but he is probably right about the CCA not being high enough for the winter. 4 years could be long enough for the battery to go bad. I usually just wait for the car to not start one morning but I have backup transportation and jumper cables in case.
Its not totally out of the realm of going bad. You can always bring it in to auto zone or some relative place and ask to do a battery test. It's always nice to have a second opinion. Unless you like dancing with the devil and get stranded in the middle of winter.
At the Honda dealership I worked at we had a small hand held tester and if it failed that then we would hook it up to a GR8 tester and that would give us the exact details of the battery's state. Just ask to see the actual failed test recipet and if it actually did I would reccomend replacing, especially before winter.
well, they apparently don't have a "GR8" tester, both tests were done with hand held devices. one showed 390 cold cranks? another 370, nominal value should be 490? i guess i'll give them the benefit of the doubt and insure myself for the winter and have them replace it.
Is it the original battery in the vehicle? My experience, OE batteries tend to suck. The outlier there always seemed to be OE Equipped Motorcraft batteries for some reason.
4 years in MN is a reasonable lifespan for an OEM battery. I'd probably be replacing it as a preventative myself, test or no test. I probably wouldn't opt to have the dealer replace it with another stock battery though.
yes, as i mentioned this is original battery to the car and it'll be 4 years in november. i looked around and battery prices range from 112-200$, i'm assuming i won't be getting the 200$ battery from them but everything out the door is 150$ so i figured there's some premium over 112$ cost but they did give me a loaner (due to another issue) and make this pretty painless.
If you do need and buy a battery look at interstate battery's, we sold them in the service garage I use to work at and in the 10 years I worked there we sold a lot of them and had very few come back for warranty or exchange issues. There great batteries.
