One of the cars on the fleet that I seldom write about is the newest member - a 2021 Dacia Sander Stepway which I've owned for about 2 years. To be fair, over that time its not really put a foot wrong - since it was bought with 8000 miles on the clock and now only has about 18,000 miles thats not unsurprising!
Anyway, for a while now the Dacia battery has been a bit rubbish, needing putting on the trickle charger about once a month. It does generally get used for local duties, doing 5-10 miles at a time, but gets longer runs fairly often. Now its getting colder, it seems to be worse so the trigger was pulled on a new battery from the excellent Tayna.co.uk, a UK-based retailer of car batteries who I've used many times in the past. They have very good pricing, and cheap & prompt delivery.
As usual, it arrived within 48h. I trickle charged it overnight and fitted it this morning. I opted for a mid-price Yuasa ESB with more CCAs and Ah than what was on there currently. I came mildly unstuck when I realised that the new battery was about 40mm longer than the old one, and the battery tray has a weird plastic protrusion to hold the OEM battery in place
However 20 minutes with a hacksaw blade, stanley knife and a bit of sandpaper had that removed and sanded flat, and the new battery then fitted like a glove.
As usual, once the new battery was installed and the ignition put on, the dashboard lit up like Blackpool Illuminations, but a short drive, turning the steering wheel lock-to-lock and confirming that the tyre pressures were OK had it settled down again. What was a little bit interesting* was all the errors it threw for things our base Sandero doesn't have. I got TPM, front radar, rear electric windows and something else warnings on first startup but these went away after I turned the ignition off then on again.
Not radically interesting, but cost me less than half what Dacia wanted for a new battery of lesser spec. There seems to be a bit of internet noise about the longevity of the OEM batteries on Dacias, with lots crapping out with similar symptoms to mine at 3-4 years old, which ours is. I guess its one of the ways that Dacia can sell them so cheap and still make money on them but its a bit annoying. Anyway, the new battery should last another 5 years or so I hope.
One further annoyance is the SOS system on the car, I believe the idea is that if you break down and don't know where you are, you press the button in the headlining for 3 seconds and it connects you to the emergency services and geo-locates you too. Anyway the dashboard began to flash up errors about a year ago intermittently, and has got worse and worse to the point its now on more than off. Apparently the system has its own battery in the dashboard somewhere which conks out after a while and throws the error. I had this mentally logged as something to get looked at under warranty when it was next in for a service with the main dealer, as it could be a faulty battery or alternatively it could be the GSM aerial being broken too. Dashboard warning lights bug the hell out of me, but my wife who is the primary driver isn't bothered by them at all - especially if its something like the SOS function which she'd never use anyway so its not a big deal.
On first startup the error returned, but I'm pleased to say that after a week of use it seems to have self-healed, with no warnings now - so that was an added bonus. I wonder if the old battery was taking the priority alternator charge to try and keep the engine running, and that this had the effect of starving the auxilliary SOS battery of electrons and making it sad?
Anyway, its £100 well spent in my book, the battery was explicitly not covered by the warranty and Dacia would have wanted £225 to fit what I assume would be another 'slightly crap' OEM battery to it. I'll see how I get on with this Yuasa but its got off to a good start.
I'll keep the old battery as I have a 12v > 120w 3-pin plug inverter which might be handy in a power cut potentially. It'd keep a load of LED lights working for a few hours at least!
