Is there any way to tell how much a battery has been used?

[ROJA]

I'm planning to buy a bike soon. How can I tell if an in-stock model has barely been ridden versus used as a demo with 100 battery cycles on it already? Other than obvious wear and tear, is there a diagnostic that can be run on the battery or something like that? For example, I've used this for a mac and it's quite useful: http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/

This is for a Specialized Turbo X (leading contender at this point) if that matters.

 

[Eric R]

Hey ROJA, have you seen this: http://sydney-electric-bikes.myshopify.com/products/electric-bicycle-battery-load-test ?

Here's an excerpt from the page:

All Lithium batteries for Ebikes will loose capacity over time. As the cells deplete, typically 1 to 2 years, you will find your daily range drops. Eventually the battery will become unusable. A common cause of Ebike breakdowns are actually a battery voltage running too low and disconnecting the power to the Ebike. It's very hard to know how many Amp Hours your battery has left during it's lifetime. The only definitive way is to load test the battery after a full charge. Our battery tester is a perfect way to give your ebike battery a health check. It will print out a report of the total capacity of the battery, the health of the cells and the discharge curve.

I don't think that this is the only option, but maybe a start nevertheless.

Cheers.

 

[David Thomas of Peshtigo]

The Bosch Intuvia on-board computer has a feature to indicate how many hours of battery on-time it has. To access it, bring up the settings menu by pressing and holding both the Reset and Information buttons. Then cycle through the settings. This is also where you see serial and firmware numbers.
Good luck with your project. BTW I'm loving my Trek XM700. Good stuff!