Will it start?
November 18, 2021 6:27 PM   Subscribe

My 2007 Honda Fit won't start again. If I buy an HR-V, will it start?

Yes, Past Unusual is still fighting with her Honda Fit (October 2020, March 2021). Last April, I ended up having two different private mechanics look at my car (and replaced the struts), and both said the parasitic draw was well within guidelines for the car. They popped in a new battery, patted me on the head, and sent me on my way. Now, I've been driving my car every 1-1.5 weeks, and we've had temps in the 20s for a week, and like clockwork it won't start. I literally drove it for 40 minutes 1 week ago today, and now it won't start.

I am... unhappy.

The things I like about my car are: 1.) it's small and nimble, 2.) I can fit a lot of stuff in it, including long things (like a surfboard and a llama--that's a Honda Fit joke), 3.) it gets passable gas mileage. If I could replace it with an identical car that started consistently, I would pay a large amount of money to do so.

It looks like at this point, the closest option is an HR-V. However, I cannot promise to drive it more than once every week to a week and a half. We will go for weeks where our high temps do not get above 0ºF. Our garage is not big enough for both vehicles, and contractors are booking 18 months out in our area so there is a good chance that any vehicle I own will spend some time sitting under a snowbank for this and possibly next winter. If I have to trickle charge the thing, I will have to climb over the snowbank in subzero temps. If I sign up for spending more than $20,000, I do not want to do that anymore.

So herein lies my question - if I buy a new or newish HR-V, will it start in a Northern US winter? Unfortunately, the people in this forum I found do not seem to think so but if anyone knows better please give me good news. If not, then what else should I look at? I do not want a big SUV. We do not have enough plugins in my area for me to consider a fully electrical vehicle yet. But otherwise, I'm open to answers like "buy this 30-year old vehicle that is the Nokia of vehicles".

Thank you.
posted by past unusual to Travel & Transportation (40 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
A Kia Soul fits a surprising amount of cargo for its smallish footprint. It's not quite an SUV despite being officially classified as such; it's like a square hatchback. Its styling does seems to be polarizing.
posted by microscopiclifeform at 6:39 PM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


You can get a battery disconnect switch for cheap if you think it's the parasitic drain killing the battery. May be a pain to pop the hood and switch it Off each time you use the car. This may play havoc with the computer who doesn't like having power killed though.

I'm not an expert in battery tech, but you could investigate if there's a type that works better in cold weather.

I'd probably also suggest investing in a jump pack you can keep charged inside the house.

40 minutes of driving may not be enough to charge an almost dead battery that's cold and been sitting for weeks.

There are also inexpensive battery voltage meters you can get, to see how the battery is doing.
posted by TheAdamist at 6:50 PM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


Response by poster: Okay, I know you mean well, TheAdamist. Your answer was offered in good faith. Thank you for the good intentions.

But I must emphasize that I have been driving this vehicle at least once every 7-10 days since I put a new battery in this vehicle 6 months ago. I know people who live in this same weather region and drive their cars a similar amount, and do not need to invest in special battery disconnect switches. My husband's 2013 Prius is used a similar amount in the same conditions and has never not started. This is not an impossible task.

So, for responses I would greatly appreciate answers to my question: suggestions of vehicles that will be able to start in these conditions.
posted by past unusual at 6:58 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Best answer: So, I have a 2017 Honda HR-V that I adore. But I live in new England and I work from home, and once the temps go below freezing I'm screwed. If I don't run it for at least 20 minutes a day, and it goes for two or three days without running at all, it doesn't start. At this point, as soon as it doesn't start in the winter, I just leave it till it gets warm again, and cadge rides off my roommates or borrow their cars if I need them.

I'm on at least my third battery, probably fourth, and have just resigned myself to "new battery every spring" being part of the cost of owning this. It's easier than bringing it to the dealer and having them tell me it's because I don't drive enough. I mean, I don't, it's true, but I've had cars in the same size range sit for weeks in a cold, snowy winter (*shakes fist at winter 2015*) and start right up again.

These batteries just cannot cope with the cold at all. It's super annoying.
posted by current resident at 7:06 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


So, I have bad news. An EV is not going to solve this problem for you, in that (as far as I know) every single modern electric car still relies on using the same old crappy 12V starter batteries as your Fit does. I've gone through this with a couple of vehicles now in a location known for its cold winters including a hybrid and an EV. I've even owned a 2007 Honda Fit, although that wasn't really the offender. What I'm saying here is that you should not assume that a bigger car or a different car won't result in your 12V battery dying after it's been buried in a snowbank and not driven or connected to power for a week or two.

What saved my sanity these past few years is this battery tender, which ensured that my car was startable no matter what. It came with a quick-disconnect that seemed reasonable enough for me and wasn't much hassle to connect when I knew it was going to sit for a while. I know you might have to run an outdoor/waterproof extension cord to it, but that may just be how it is if you're in battery-killing weather.

(I now live in a warmer clime, and even now when I don't drive my plug-in hybrid for a couple of weeks while it's not on power it pesters me - by email! - that it's gone into "sleep" mode and that the battery is about to die. So, yeah.)
posted by eschatfische at 7:46 PM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


> if I buy a new or newish HR-V, will it start in a Northern US winter?
I love my 2020 HR-V, but the battery is my biggest complaint. I'm in a milder climate than you, but weekly drives to the grocery store half a mile away were insufficient to keep the battery charged. After less than a year of ownership, the car failed to start and had to be jump-started. I set up a battery tender (this one) and haven't had trouble since. So no, I don't think a new HR-V is going to solve this problem for you.

I agree with the previous poster that if your goal is that your vehicle always starts and you never have to worry about it failing to do so due to battery discharge, then the best solution might be in the form of a battery tender rather than a specific type of new vehicle, but I understand from your follow-up that this is not what you want to hear.
> If I have to trickle charge the thing, I will have to climb over the snowbank in subzero temps.
I don't understand this. Modern conditioning battery tenders do not need to be unplugged regularly. You just leave them plugged in while the car is parked, and unplug them when ready to drive. Run the cable somewhere convenient, e.g. under the hood next to the driver's door, and no snowbank climbing should be required. It should be as easy as unplugging something near the driver's door each time you drive.
posted by Syllepsis at 8:12 PM on November 18, 2021


in that (as far as I know) every single modern electric car still relies on using the same old crappy 12V starter batteries as your Fit does

It takes maybe 12J from the 12V battery to start an electric car and 5000J-20000J to start a gasoline car. You could start an EV with a pack of AAs. However, you should leave them plugged in so they can keep the battery warm.


In real cold places, we have block heaters and keep our vehicles plugged in for that reason. So, to answer your question, any car starts if you keep warm and charged.

There are also multiple classes of battery. An Optima red-top will last longer than a random walmart battery and is more tolerant of being run down -- still a bad idea to let a starting battery run down to empty. Even once will make that battery never work well again. Just 5 times can completely kill a battery. This is probably the problem you are seeing.

It may be annoying to have a battery disconnect, but they're $7 and the car you have now would be "an identical car that started consistently". You need to pop the hood and take 5 seconds to unscrew it.

From your previous thread
in a normal year I drive my car approximately 2 miles to work and back each work day,
and you mention other cars don't have this problem. Some cars have undersized alternators, might just be Honda Fits as driven by you: alternators don't work well below a certain speed, so if you are accelerating slowly, it wouldn't charge well.
posted by flimflam at 8:16 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Currently, I have a block heater installed on this Honda Fit, which I did not think to plug in since this was a relatively mild early cold snap and the battery is new. It does help, definitely, but even with using that I would need to trickle charge my vehicle overnight about every 1-2 weeks to have it consistently start.

I’ve had these starting issues for as long as I’ve owned this car (2009) but it’s become even worse since COVID and lockdown. As of this fall, I now work from home, so the daily commute as short as it was is not longer necessary. I’ve been making an effort to drive for errands, hence the 7-10 days between uses, instead of letting it sit for 3-4 weeks like I did in 2020.

The trickle charger that I have requires me to pop the hood and attach leads to the battery. The only place to park my car that doesn’t block in the other vehicle and that the 100-ft extension cord can reach has the car angled in a weird corner where I’m stuck in a snowbank because that is literally the only place to put the snow from most of our long driveway. I have complained about this to SO. Very. Many. Mechanics. All of them just nod along and tell me to use the trickle charger I have that requires popping the hood. I don’t know if the type of trickle chargers you are talking about aren’t a thing in my area or if the mechanics just don’t care enough to sell me something. But I am done with mechanics who insist that my car is fine and I am done trying to fix the vehicle I have. I will not be attaching any more components to this vehicle.

At this point, I think the most likely outcome is going down to one car, The Prius That Starts, until we replace the garage.
posted by past unusual at 8:33 PM on November 18, 2021


Response by poster: I should add that for whatever reason, the pull for the hood on this vehicle usually requires that I yank on it and fiddle with the hood in between 3-4 times before it will come open. Where I have to park my car, I have to walk around the car by the passenger side each time, over the snow bank, and then muck with the hood before my freezing fingers find it won’t open again. When I get it open, the bar to hold it up has lost the plastic end that keeps it in the right spot easily when I prop it up so I have to fiddle with it to get it in place. Because of the limited daylight hours during the winter, I am often doing this in the dark (before work when I commuted and now after work for errands).

Yes, this has all been maddening.
posted by past unusual at 8:42 PM on November 18, 2021


I am done with mechanics who insist that my car is fine and I am done trying to fix the vehicle I have ... Yes, this has all been maddening.

Seems to me that the communication difficulty here is down to different meanings attached to the word "fine". To a mechanic, "this car is fine" means "this car is working as designed". To an owner who finds their car refusing to start again. and again. and again, "this car is fine" means "this car is reliable and practical and fun to drive and will never require me to crawl through the snow". They're just not the same thing.

But here's the thing: the issue as you've described it is completely consistent with the expected performance of the lead-acid starter batteries that are used in every car. They really don't work well at below-freezing temperatures, and they really don't work well when they're regularly stored at well below a full state of charge. In fact these two things go hand in hand - the way the battery chemistry works considerably lowers the freezing point of the electrolyte in a charged battery compared to a flat one, which makes a flat battery freeze much more easily. And an actually-frozen battery is both not going to start your car and not going to charge.

The battery in your Fit sounds like it gets exposed to the perfect storm: it will be physically small compared to what's installed in a larger car, it will be physically closer to the snow over the bodywork compared to a battery in something bigger, it spends a lot of time slowly discharging under freezing conditions, it doesn't get charged super often and when it does, the charge it gets is the brutal fast charge applied by a car alternator. Under these conditions I would be astonished to see a lead-acid starter battery achieve anything even close to their typical three year service life.

In your position I would not be letting the maddening caused by endless start failures and patronizing mechanics push me to spend five figures on replacing an otherwise perfectly serviceable car. Instead, I'd be looking to spend three figures on bringing the operating conditions for the starter battery in the one I already had closer to what the battery is designed to work under.

What would be 100% certain to work is keeping your car battery on float/trickle charge for the whole time the car was parked at your house. Not only would this keep it 100% charged for almost all of the time, it should cause enough waste heat to be generated inside the battery to stop it freezing. So in your shoes I'd be looking for ways to make that convenient and practicable.

It should not be beyond the wit of a creative auto electrician to design a robust mounting for a float/trickle charger into your engine bay, and wire that to a caravan-style mains power inlet in the bodywork, so that all you need to do when you're going to leave the car parked outside for a week is plug in a mains cord instead of needing to faff about with clipping stuff onto the battery under the hood with freezing hands.

A trench with a mains electricity cable running to a weatherproof power outlet on a post near where you park the car would also mean you could do this without running extension cords all over, and would cost way less to build than a new garage.
posted by flabdablet at 10:05 PM on November 18, 2021 [25 favorites]


I've been driving my car every 1-1.5 weeks

If this were me and I could not get trades folk out to build the adjustments flabdablet suggests (which is a better idea than mine), I would remove the battery after each drive and keep it in the garage until I wanted to use the car again. Ok, that sucks for convenience, but you will have a working battery when you want one.
posted by Thella at 11:36 PM on November 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


This is a totally fixable problem if you have a competent shop you can send it to. You may need another new battery once it's actually fixed because they never work quite right again after being fully drained, but in the meantime one of those jump boxes should get the car started when it kills the battery at least.

The diagnosis shouldn't take more than an hour or so of work (maybe two hours of wall clock time because you have to wait for all the electronics to go to sleep) and it's dead simple. All you need is a good multimeter that can read current draw, a fuse puller, a wrench, and maybe a wiring diagram depending on which circuit the fault is on. The repair may or may not be expensive depending on what exactly is broken.

One thing you can do yourself to eliminate the simplest cause is to turn off the car, pop the hood, them wait an hour, open up the fuse box, and see if any of the relays inside are warm. If so, it's probably just a stuck relay continuing to power something that shouldn't be powered when the car is asleep.

If it's not that, you disconnect the positive lead from the battery, insert the multimeter in current mode between the battery and the lead with croc clips, wait for everything to go to sleep, look at the current reading, then start pulling fuses until it drops significantly. Whatever is causing the problem is on that circuit. Once you've found that out, you can isolate the problem component using the same technique, but only disconnecting things downstream of the fuse.

If you weren't driving the car for a month or two at a time, I'd agree that there's probably not an issue with the car, but you say it's only a couple of weeks. That points to excess power draw, not a design problem. A battery cutoff would work around the issue, but is completely unnecessary.

Find a mechanic that will spend the time to properly diagnose the problem. It'll probably cost you a hundred bucks, but that's a hell of a lot cheaper than a new car.
posted by wierdo at 11:57 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Another possibility, also achievable by a competent auto electrician, would be to install a standard trailer lamp connector onto the back of the car where those things normally go, wired directly to the battery through a fuse. You could hook that up to a 12V charging outlet mounted on a post near where you park the car, fed by a low voltage cable run underground from a battery charger inside your garage.

That way you wouldn't have a permanently fitted large mains power inlet making your car look weird, your battery charger wouldn't need to be designed to cope with the high temperatures and physical beating it would get if mounted inside a car's engine bay, and you also wouldn't have potentially hazardous mains voltage in your underground cable so you'd get away with a much more casual and less expensive trench. If it were my house I'd just bury a run of 12 gauge UF cable maybe six inches below ground. A trench that shallow and narrow is easily dug by hand. Well, as long as the ground hasn't frozen yet.

The amperage involved in float/trickle charging a battery is low enough that voltage drop in a hundred feet of 12 gauge 12V charging cable shouldn't be an issue.

A 12V outdoor charging post wouldn't be any use for running the block heater, though. It might make more sense just to go for an engine bay mounted float charger and splice the mains inlet for that into whatever power inlet is already fitted to the car for its block heater. You'd also want your sparky to add a switch that would let you turn off the heater's mains supply, to let you run the charger full-time without the horrendous juice bill you'd surely see from having to do the same with the heater (a battery on float charge consumes nowhere near as much power as any kind of heater).

You could still use the same UF cable to feed a weatherproof outdoor mains outlet on a post, but you'd need to find out what your local code is for minimum trench depths and conduit requirements for mains cables and you might end up needing to hire a little mini-digger to make the trenching practical. Even so, way less spendy than replacing the car.
posted by flabdablet at 5:14 AM on November 19, 2021


Best answer: I mean, okay. You're ready to move on from this car. I would be to. We had a Jeep with a parasitic draw that always had this problem and eventually we sold it.

From the comment here... It sounds like HR-Vs tend to have this same problem.

I can only speak from my own experience, but Nissans are cheap, comfortable, reliable (they had issues in 2005-2010 but really not many after that), high mileage and lots of default features. I've driven a Altima, rogue, rogue sport, and leaf as daily drivers and I've been extremely satisfied with all of them, especially since they were some of the cheaper cars each time I drove one.

I don't think there's a better car deal right now than a used Nissan leaf if the range works for you. And an Altima with ~50k miles shouldn't be more than 12K and would be a great drive, if the space works for you.
posted by bbqturtle at 5:48 AM on November 19, 2021


I would need to trickle charge my vehicle overnight about every 1-2 weeks to have it consistently start

Trickle charging overnight every 1-2 weeks will be nowhere near as protective of your battery as keeping it on float charge all the time it's not in use, especially under conditions where the battery's electrolyte would be susceptible to at least partial freezing.

Also, because the total amount of energy that a charger dumps into a battery is mainly set by how much energy has been removed from that battery, spreading the charge timing out in this way will not cost anywhere near as much in extra energy as might at first be expected.

In effect, what the charger is doing is providing the energy to supply whatever standing load your car would otherwise put on your battery while parked, and if it's doing that continuously rather than in fortnightly bursts, you get an efficiency benefit from having that small load supplied directly from the charger instead of cycling in and out of a battery that's only good for something like 70-80% round-trip efficiency.

Yes, a continuously connected charger will also be a pushing a tiny trickle of energy even into a fully-charged battery that doesn't get stored, just converted to heat; but given that you want the battery not to freeze, that's no bad thing and well worth the small energy cost.
posted by flabdablet at 6:07 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: So, to further clarify and then I'll step back. I am experiencing two problems:

1. The physical problem. Which yes, this should be fixable. I agree it should be fixable. This is why, in spite of my vehicle not starting multiple times every winter and having to spend way more time doing maintenance on this vehicle than I should, I had not yet sold it.

2. A sociological problem: I have had this vehicle looked at least 10 different times for this issue at this point and what happens is that I can explain the problem, they nod, they look at the vehicle, they charge me money, and then they insist that I do not have the problem that I my lived experiences indicate that I do indeed have. This includes at two different dealerships, and now last spring at two private garages where I was recommended to go by people I know who trust those mechanics (and in one case had a parasitic draw issue fixed by that very garage). The only time I've received something vaguely like actual answer was when I was trying to have a lightbulb replaced at a Jiffy-Lube, but the mechanic couldn't do the work that needed to be done to find what he thought was a loose electrical wire somewhere.

So, while I understand that all of the answers given here were given with good intentions, I also need to point out that the responses I am receiving are illustrative of the exact problem that I am having: I ask for assistance with something about this vehicle and then receive a response that insists that I do not have the problem that I my lived experiences indicate that I do indeed have.

Please imagine that you have asked a question repeatedly, and every supposed expert response you receive insists that you do not understand what you are talking about and that you are foolish for asking the question in the first place. Now imagine that you have spent thousands of dollars doing this. Then please imagine that you have asked for advice in doing an alternative path, only to receive what is fundamentally the same kind of response. In this mental space, please try to understand why reading some of these well-intended responses I experienced a sensation that can only be described as the "Kill Bill siren".

If assuming that the premise of my question was illogical and that talking to just one more mechanic would solve the issue, please consider that perhaps your gut response is also part of the sociological aspect of the problem.

I asked for whether an HR-V would start, and it sounds like it won't (thank you). I asked for recommendations of a vehicle that would start (thank you for those suggestions). If anyone has any other vehicle suggestions, I am open to those.
posted by past unusual at 6:28 AM on November 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


It sounds like another 2013ish Prius might work, no? Or presumably a newer model?
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 6:45 AM on November 19, 2021


Has any mechanic suggested modifying the battery tray by bending the lip flat on on side and putting in a bigger 51R sized battery? The last time you asked about this problem I suggested that, after looking at Fit forums and seeing it as a common mod done to Fits in cold climates (I work in the Arctic, cold climates are my thing). That would allow you to use the best battery I’ve ever owned — a Bosch AGM.

My Mazda3 had all kinds of battery inadequacy issues dealing with its first two New York winters. I gave up on warranty-replacing what would have been battery #3 in 2 years, dropped $150 on a Bosch AGM, and it has been note perfect for five years, the last several of which have been 200 miles further north in western Mass, where we get some decently cold stretches for sure. I have to start my old truck every couple of days or keep its battery on a tender, but I never find myself needing to do they on the Mazda3. It can easily go a couple of weeks below freezing and start up fine. We are just starting our 6th winter together and the Bosch tests fine and continues to reliably start my car in all weather. I’ve probably never gone more than two weeks, but I definitely have gone about that long a few times as I use the truck more locally in winter, and save the car for long distance hauls. Anyway, it’s a thought. I will shill the hell out of that Bosch battery, it has astounded me.

Otherwise I’m in team battery tender, no matter what car you drive, if you’re looking at weeks around 0F without driving or starting the vehicle. I often leave one on my truck in very cold weather. It’s not a big deal.

But I can highly recommend a Mazda3. My 2014 is about to turn over 100k (today!) and she’s been dead on reliable other than that weird battery issue in her first two years, and a blown out wheel bearing in her 5th year, thanks NYC potholes. A hoot to drive. Really great in snow on snow tires, 40mpg, in hatchback form a very capable hauler (I get a full band small PA in there easily), and once I’d swapped the battery for something not made of beeswax and hope I have never once had her fail to start. She’s got another 100k in her easy.
posted by spitbull at 6:54 AM on November 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


I have a 2016 Ford Fiesta, which I bought new when my last compact Ford finally started causing me too many headaches after a decade of reliability. It holds a lot of stuff (I have only driven a Fit once and reallllly disliked the sightlines, so I have no idea how storage compares, but this thing has a surprisingly large trunk and the back seats fold down). I work from home, and before that walked to work, so I've driven it usually once a week since time immemorial, running around doing errands on the weekend. I've never had it not start and I park outside, uncovered. I live in Ohio so it gets cold but not like Alaska cold, but I have driven it back to Chicago many times in the winter and not had any issues with it starting.

Gas mileage is great, it's easy to park, I have no complaints.
posted by jabes at 6:54 AM on November 19, 2021


Oh and I have to mention this: Honda CRVs (not HRVs) are widely used (as are Toyota Rav4s) as taxis in the community where I work on Alaska’s north slope. There it gets to -30 fairly often, and it’s around 0 F for months on end. Everyone uses block heaters including the little taxis. The reason they use Honda CRVS for taxis is that they’re a) super durable on icy gravel roads and b) and get great gas mileage relative to the bigger trucks most people drive there, where gas is currently $9 a gallon. But if they didn’t reliably start in sub-zero conditions, they would not be in use. So yeah that’s an option for you.
posted by spitbull at 7:00 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


To be fair, taxis are unusual among cars in that they spend more time being driven than parked. It shouldn't be at all surprising to find that a taxi never suffers cold battery issues, regardless of make or model.
posted by flabdablet at 7:07 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


In Arctic villages the taxis don’t run 24/7, so they’re spending some hours shut down. But true, never more than that. Good point. But as an endorsement of overall cold weather ruggedness (there are no paved roads in the Arctic, pavement can’t take the cold), the (mostly Thai, a fascinating social history) cab drivers who own those things know what they are doing. Plus everyone in the Arctic knows how to work on Honda engines, they’re ubiquitous on so many machines.
posted by spitbull at 7:15 AM on November 19, 2021


Got sun? You can get Solar Panel car battery tenders which plug into the cigarette lighter outlet. The solar panel itself can be mounted outside, or if you have great sun, left inside on a window. Most of them come with suction cups for this purpose.

Tons of examples from Amazon or a more ethical vendor.

Back of the napkin calculations:
* a typical car starting battery has ~30-50 amp hours of capacity
* but lead acid batteries probably won't start your car when more than 50% drained in the cold weather, so call it 20 amp hours
* 20 amp hours * 12 volts = 240 watt hours
* if you don't drive for 1.5 weeks, that's roughly 10 days
* so you are losing 24 watt hours/day.
* your drain is therefore 1 watt continuously, which is not unusual for a modern car that is "off"

To replace 24 watt hours/day:
* assume you get 4 hours equivalent sun
* assume the solar panel is perfectly south facing (northern hemnisphere)
* assume perfect cloudless weather
* you would need a 6 watt panel

But with solar a good rule of thumb is to double everything. If the weather is cloudy, double it again.

I would get a 24 W or higher solar panel.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 7:40 AM on November 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


I have a 2005 Toyota Corolla that lives outside, often under banks of snow in the winter (New York) that has no problem starting. I think Corollas might be the Nokia of which you speak.
posted by greta simone at 7:53 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


I was also going to also suggest a solar charger (as a less effective alternative to a trickle charger) but I'm fairly sure this car has a switched cigarette lighter socket (if whatever's plugged in there won't work with the ignition off, you also can't push charge through it back to the battery.) It would be "easy" to add another accessory cigarette lighter charging port that is directly connected to the battery with a fused wire, but it seems like the OP is pretty much at the "burn it for the insurance money" stage of their relationship with this car rather than the "modify it to improve it in an attempt to resolve this problem" stage.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 7:59 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


I live in New England. I had this problem consistently with a 2008 Nissan Versa. I have never had this problem with my current car, a 2013 CRV. I've been working from home since early March 2020, and have repeatedly gone several weeks in the winter without driving my car. It's bigger than the Fit or the HRV, but not annoyingly so (in my opinion).

We've also never had problems with my husband's 2016 Mazda3, but we tend to drive it more consistently for stuff like running to the grocery store. Both cars live outside.
posted by catoclock at 8:15 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


The Fit's 151R battery is notoriously small and weak—but it can be replaced.

If you remove or modify the battery tray in a 2007 Fit, you can fit a 51R battery in the spot. The larger 51R battery will be much more resilient to cold temperatures.
posted by vitout at 10:08 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


I just helped a friend upgrade the battery in their Honda Fit yesterday! I think Spitbull is onto something here. Look into "Honda Fit battery upgrade" on various owner forums or Youtube and you'll find lots of folks in a similar situation. Honda puts a rinky dink battery in these cars that really doesn't do the trick in cold weather. And my friend was suffering the same aggravation with service technicians giving him the runaround and saying there wasn't anything they could do.

We followed this video almost to the letter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAqQQJQTsU4

Got a bigger battery with better cranking power and cut the tray to accommodate. Worth looking into, good luck!
posted by fatedblue at 10:23 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


For what its worth, my parents have a FIT and they had a intermittent starting issue a few months ago, getting a new starter installed fixed the issue. Seems like a common issue with Honda Fit owners, unfortunately, its not a recall.
posted by edman at 12:05 PM on November 19, 2021


It is a common problem. That’s why the bigger battery mod is popular and well documented. I think it’s a cheap solution that may make the difference here. The OEM unit is a rinkydink battery and when you go to a larger size there are better quality batteries available too.

I am personally not a fan of the Fit for other reasons, but I can’t believe this has cost you so much money and time and would not dispense of any working solid car right now — have you seen the price and availability madness of the current market? — without trying this basic, cheap, widely attested to work solution.
posted by spitbull at 12:32 PM on November 19, 2021


On the other hand, charge that battery up good and sell it on a warm weekend and you’ll get 20-25% more for that Fit that it was worth a year ago. If you really hate it and can get through the winter on just your Prius, hope prices come down by spring and get something you like better. Selling a working car you need to immediately replace right now is a bad idea.
posted by spitbull at 12:50 PM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Minnesotan here. Any decent car can be made to start in the cold. However, I often say that finding a good mechanic is harder than finding a good doctor. You have not yet found a good mechanic if they haven’t understood your problem and proposed at least one workable solution. I will also say that the “stealer” is almost never where you find a good mechanic, probably because they would like to sell you a new car (but that may be my natural cynicism talking).

After ten years driving a diesel car I learned Three Great Tricks That Jack Frost Hates: cram in the biggest battery you can get—a good mechanic can figure out how to do this, block heater—a good mechanic can recommend one, and battery blanket heater—ditto. I usually got three or four years out of a battery.

Good luck finding a good mechanic. Note that a friend’s good mechanic may not be yours just as their good doctor might not be for you either. Otherwise, good luck picking a car you like better.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 1:22 PM on November 19, 2021


I have been paid to cut off clamp terminals, crimp on ring terminals, and splice the 120V line of a trickle charger into a block heater plug before. I'm sorry you can't find someone to do this work which would solve your problem. Since you can't get an automotive person to do it, consider a residential electrician or handyman. Don't ask for a diagnostic, just tell them this is what you want and ask how much.
posted by flimflam at 11:16 PM on November 19, 2021


For what it’s worth I use this $24 trickle charger. I don’t really even notice the extra electrical usage. It’s cheap but it works fine as a trickle charger or a general purpose battery charger.

It’s pretty trivial. If you’re running an extension cord outside, be sure it is a heavy gauge outdoor cable, and that it is plugged into a GFCI (ground fault interrupt) outlet — if you have outdoor outlets already they are GFCI already, otherwise a kitchen or a bathroom would have these by code. You can also buy an electrical battery warming blanket, but I’ve never needed that in New England (Minnesota chimed in above and yeh multiple days below zero F on the regular is block heater/warming pad/glow plug territory. In which case a Honda Fit may not be the ideal vehicle either.)

Also worth having a lithium battery car starter — they’re $50-75 and the smallest ones will work on a Fit just fine. If a battery actually doesn’t have enough power to crank those will work in many instances. Keep it charged up in the house in cold weather but take it with you when you go. I would never be without one in the car, along with a tire compressor (those have gotten cheap, $25-30 buys a decent one). Lifesaving stuff, cheaper than you need to even think about.

If everything else about the car is fine, this is just a bad bad time to be dumping it for something new because of the utterly crazy market for cars right now. A cheap solution that requires minimal work to get through the winter would seem preferable to taking a huge financial hit over an easily addressed problem.
posted by spitbull at 5:49 AM on November 20, 2021


By the way you really don’t need to run the battery tender/trickle charger 24/7. If you know you’ll need the car in a few hours or the next day, then you plug it in.
posted by spitbull at 5:57 AM on November 20, 2021


The point of keeping a trickle charger permanently connected and leaving it running the whole time the car is parked is that this will prevent the battery from running flat even if the car has parasitic loads that for whatever reason it's not practicable to track down. It will also keep the battery slightly warmer. So it's a cheap and easy workaround for a wide range of possible car faults as well as compensation for an abused and/or undersized battery.
posted by flabdablet at 6:57 AM on November 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


Right but for most of the US, winter is not an unrelenting three months of subfreezing weather. And you aren’t always going days or weeks between running the vehicle unless you park it for the season like a sports car. I’m trying to make it seem less intimidating, since OP seems daunted by the correct solution to this problem.

My truck has a parasitic load drain and a fairly tired old battery at the moment. But unless I’m leaving it parked for a week or more at consistently sub-freezing temps, or much longer at warmer temps, it will always start ok. So I break out the tender if I’m leaving it for longer than a week and I expect freezing temps for a substantial part of that time.

Works fine for me anyway. The battery in my truck takes a month or more to drain to flat, left unstarted, at higher temps than 35 or so. Of course at this point I’m making an old battery last longer, not trying to keep a newer battery in top shape for longevity. YMMV. But if your concern is either that hassle of plugging it in and connecting it up, or electricity usage, a use-it-when-you-need-it strategy has always worked for me.

I just talked myself into a new truck battery for this winter lol.
posted by spitbull at 7:12 AM on November 20, 2021


I can't see anyone denying your lived experience and the best answers you've had don't suggest anything about going to a mechanic but simply fixing the issue you're having by wiring up a trickle charger yourself to be used all the time it is parked.
posted by turkeyphant at 11:02 PM on November 20, 2021


This is a very very long shot but once had a car with mystery problems starting when it was cold (and not nearly as cold as where you live). It turned out that inside the cable from the battery to the starter, the copper wire was broken into two pieces. When the car was not warm, or just driven, and the weather was cold, the copper contracted due to the cold, leaving a gap that broke the connection from the battery to the starter.
posted by TimHare at 8:59 PM on November 23, 2021


Response by poster: If anyone is curious about the follow-up on Past Unusual's desire to throw her Honda Fit down a well--

I decided to give the situation some time to see if I could stomp down my feelings of frustration and find a solution that would be a reasonable cost for the amount of driving I do. Last week, I bought a battery maintainer, which I installed this weekend together with a plug-in splitter to be able to plug in both the block header and battery maintainer at the same time. The car was sitting dead in my driveway for about three weeks before this, but after 14 hours with that combo plugged in it started very happily. I expect I'll need to have the battery replaced at this point, but that's par for the course.

So, thank you all for the suggestions and fingers crossed that this may finally be the combination that solves it.
posted by past unusual at 3:27 PM on February 20, 2022 [5 favorites]


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