Hi all, Just joined to chime in on this thread.. so you might need to grab a coffee for this post
I bought a Fluence last year for a commuter only car as the range is dire at around 45 miles but the round-trip to work is 40 miles and I have chargers at work!
The car is fantastic, nice ride, smooth and quiet but this car is a little special because a) It was the Autocar Fluence which was the first in the UK, and b) It has no battery lease. My battery SOH is 75% according to the Fluence app.
In December last year I was stationary waiting for a car to turn right in front of me. Looking in the mirror I could see a car approaching at speed from behind - he hasn't seen me! Brace, and wallop. Car was recovered to a body shop for a new bumper and I had to wait for two weeks for one to arrive from France (even though there were two on ebay..). I had a diesel hire car and the hire company rang me up to collect the car but I hadn't heard from the repair shop so I rang to confirm. I was then informed that the car had a flat battery (12v not traction pack), but they "had to boost charge it with a high current charger". Needless to say they fried something, so the car ended up going back to Renault main dealer where it stayed for 2 months (at £40 a day for the hire car). They had extreme issues trying to find the fault which was a lack of signal on the CanBus network. Fortunately they had another Fluence there (with no battery pack) so could substitute parts to aid diagnosis. The insurance company was about to bail me out and offer me a Leaf with the value of £6k which would have been a great deal for me. Sadly (!) the Master Tech found the fault on the last day and they returned the car to me without cost or warning lights (BCI, Danger Electrical Failure etc as also seen on my two Zoe's previously). The technician found a connector near the battery which had corroded, and the wallop from behind must have caused a high resistance joint, prevent data from the BMS management back to the control modules in the car.
So the facebook Fluence page is quite useful, but most of the Fluence owners like the car and wish to upgrade the battery pack. I think this should be fairly straight forward given that it uses Leaf gen 1 battery cell packs.
There is a guy that is selling and reconditioning battery packs, you can
find that thread here:
With the Zoe Chameleon charger, and a 40kw pack, these cars can be epic runarounds. I am patiently waiting for the UK price confirmation of the T Model 3 Performance which will ultimately replace this car, but they do get under your skin even with the abysmal range.
