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2015 Zero SR ~30.000


1. Dash dead - water in it - warranty
2. Melted charge port - warranty
3. Brake fluid overfilled at the factory and leaked on the bodywork and stained the plastic - warranty and upgraded to from plastic to painted plastics

4. Dash dead again- water in it - warranty
5. Onboard charger died - warranty
6. Bike shutting down while riding - ignition replaced - warranty
7. Battery loss of range - warranty upgraded from old 12.5 kWh to 14.4
8. Errors - bike will not move -  after two tows and ~2 months waiting on a BMS board -- warranty
9. Belt teeth broke off  at about 1000 miles past its lifetime expectation - replaced it myself

Besides that, she runs great 

I'm going to put them on eBay soon. 

Well apparently towing the motorcycle to the dealer is enough to scare away the gremlins and get the bike running again.

The tech said that it was running and charging fine when they booted it up.    OK

The notes from the service is that perhaps it was the BMS and if it happed again they might replace it ( the BMS was replaced under warranty in March with the whole battery).

They tried to update the firmware, but there was a update glitch, so Zero had to do it over the phone for them.  Rode it home with no problem.  Glad to have her back. Hopefully the gremlins stay out for a while. 

I did cuss at it, but I will try the hammer.

I'm not going to say.  I think its too embarrassing. 

Quote from: Killroy on May 17, 2019, 10:21:50 AM

FYI, My 2015 SR 12.5 battery with 26,000 miles was replaced after I had Zero review my logs.  I had tried to do some longer rides and the SOC would drop rapidly and I would be only able to maintain 20 MPH max.  I noted that the power was weak at as high as 60% SOC.  The logs listed low cell voltage and something like   "power cut back". 

The nice this is that 12.5 pack was replace with a 14.4 pack 

I'm very curious how this went for you.  Was it as simple as

1)  You tell dealer about SOC and performance issues
2)  Dealer tells you to send logs
3)  Dealer tells you that Zero is replacing the battery
4)  You schedule time for install

Was there more back and forth? How did the timeline go?  Did they provide any information or documents beyond what you could read yourself from the log parser? 

The changes we see in range versus SOC could have many explanations, including wind, ambient temperature, riding more aggressively after getting more comfortable with the bike, calibration of SOC to battery voltage, or and actual drop in capacity.  Anything that people can share about what Zero uses for warranty claims would be appreciated.

I imagine Zero could add an assessed battery capacity into the app, but I can think of several reasons why they wouldn't want to do that.  Unless we come up with a way to self-assess, I think it would be wise for every owner to contact their dealer about battery degradation at the four year mark or of course any time that there are reasons to suspect a problem with the battery.

Someone that's smarter can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe sometimes the SOC wonkyness can be correctly merely by running the bike from all the way charged to almost all the way depleted one or more times.  Running the battery to empty isn't the best for battery health, so it shouldn't be done all the time.

Yes, you had the main steps right, but it was a couple months since I sent the first log I sent.  I had a couple more rapid SOC drop situations where I was almost dead in the water on the freeway and I sent those logs too.  I asked what they saw in the logs that showed the battery was "aging", but they did not say. I was asked to do a range test from ~100% to 0%.

At Re-Fuel a while back, a Zero employee noticed that there was some binding in my 2015 SR wiring harness when turning the handle bars.  He said to stack the cables and zip tie them, so that they are relatively flat bending around the head tube.  This worked. 

I had some work done (which I am really happy about) and I was told that my wiring harness was not in the stock configuration, so they "fixed it". AND they fixed it back to binding.  So I did the same thing again to fix it back a second time. 

I mentioned the binding and I was told that rarely do you go all the way to the steering limit.  HAH - I go all the way to the steering limit every time I push my bike of my garage and turn it around. 

I was told that the 2015 has one more cable, so it may be more common to have binding issues.