Bad battery? (Help appreciated) Issues on cold crank here recently.

[Sereph102889]

So for the last several weeks, every time I've gone to start my car, its spun and spun and failed to crank on the first key press. It will always turn over on the second key press, but sometimes when it does, it will idle very roughly. If I shut it off, wait like 10 seconds, and try again, it will roar to life and run perfectly. At first I thought potentially bad gas, but I've never had issues and I only go to the same station every time.

Last night I needed to go Walmart, and the car did the same thing it's been doing except this time, once it did crank, the power steering definitely didn't initialize properly and it had the rough idle. I shut it down, waited 10 seconds, and fired it back up and it ran perfectly fine BUT I had a check engine light. I scanned the codes and this is what I got, pics attached.

(In one of the PICs you can see it says 15 Volts. These codes were ran after the car had been running stable and after several minutes of driving to Walmart.)

It seems to be voltage related, perhaps my battery is on the way out. I don't have a Voltage tester but this car is going on 2 years old now and it was a showroom floor car and the dealership informed me, the day of purchase, that the battery needed to be charged because it had died numerous times due to people playing around inside the car over the course of time that it had been on the showroom floor.

Come to think of it, several weeks ago I went to get into the car and the infotainment screen had a message that said something about "Battery Voltage drop, or low, drive car for a few minutes" or something like that.

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[Sereph102889]

@zrk Hate to @ you for this, but do you have any ideas?

 

[zrk]

Battery

 

[Sereph102889]

Battery

Haha, figured. Thanks

 

[antonio88x]

Yeah "recharging" the battery isn't as simple as the dealer was making it out to be. If it ever said to "replace battery" on the dash, it needed to be replaced. But the BMW system registers the charge of the battery and then it plots the voltage decline and the rest of the computers compensate according to that formula. So if the battery was recharged, but not reprogrammed, the computers are expecting a different voltage than what the battery is outputting and you'll get errors all over the car.

 

[Sereph102889]

Yeah "recharging" the battery isn't as simple as the dealer was making it out to be. If it ever said to "replace battery" on the dash, it needed to be replaced. But the BMW system registers the charge of the battery and then it plots the voltage decline and the rest of the computers compensate according to that formula. So if the battery was recharged, but not reprogrammed, the computers are expecting a different voltage than what the battery is outputting and you'll get errors all over the car.

Thank you. It never said "replace" but did warn me of a voltage drop and said I either needed to charge the battery or drive the car to naturally charge it back up. The car did the same shit today, despite me having just driven it last night so I called the Toyota Dealership and they are going to replace the battery under warranty. I also went and bought a Battery Tender. I've the got car hooked up to the Battery Tender and hoping that this issue stops going forward, at least until I can get the new battery from Toyota.

I've never owned a BMW, or a car with this level of electronic control systems before, so some of what I was experiencing was a bit concerning even though I felt like it would be a battery issue.

 

[razorlab]

Bimmerlink can also give you a better view into the battery health...

 

[antonio88x]

Thank you. It never said "replace" but did warn me of a voltage drop and said I either needed to charge the battery or drive the car to naturally charge it back up. The car did the same shit today, despite me having just driven it last night so I called the Toyota Dealership and they are going to replace the battery under warranty. I also went and bought a Battery Tender. I've the got car hooked up to the Battery Tender and hoping that this issue stops going forward, at least until I can get the new battery from Toyota.

I've never owned a BMW, or a car with this level of electronic control systems before, so some of what I was experiencing was a bit concerning even though I felt like it would be a battery issue.

Once they put the new battery in, they'll have to program it, and all the systems should be working fine.

 

[Sereph102889]

Bimmerlink can also give you a better view into the battery health...

Is this avaliable on the free version or is payment required that features like that?

 

[razorlab]

Is this avaliable on the free version or is payment required that features like that?

Good question, I bought it so not sure.

 

[Sereph102889]

Good question, I bought it so not sure.

Well I can atleast download it and try. Thanks!

 

[zrk]

So, I've changed the battery a couple of times. One factory battery, one an antigravity. I've never programmed anything related to that.

Is it really accurate that you need to do that?

 

[razorlab]

So, I've changed the battery a couple of times. One factory battery, one an antigravity. I've never programmed anything related to that.

Is it really accurate that you need to do that?

If the battery capacity changes, I think it helps the charging system to correctly charge but I think that’s it. Still “works” if you don’t.

 

[Sereph102889]

Update:

@zrk @razorlab

Car has still been having issues starting, still throwing the same codes. I drove it to a friend's house today and it started just fine. On the way to his house I decided to do a WOT pull. Halfway through the pull I got hit with Limp Mode so I pulled over to shut it down and restart it. The car didn't want to start for 10 minutes straight. It just keeping spinning and spinning and spinning over, but never cranking. I pulled the codes and saw all the same codes I've been seeing as previously posted, except this time I saw, "Bad Ground" listed as one of the lines. The thing with that is, all the grounds are still factory and haven't been tampered with.

Finally, I got out and locked the car to let it sit to power down the ECU. This time it cranked and everything was perfectly fine, HOWEVER, while driving to my friends I was seeing voltage spiking up to 18.5V. I'm thinking this issue is going to be more than just a battery. Any thoughts all?

 

[GoldenEye]

@Sereph102889 just go to the dealership, that’s where my nightmare you’re going thru ended…

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