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Mahindra Scorpio-N: How I solved the annoying battery drain issue

18th January 2024, 12:08 by Ananth Iyer

The same issue has been observed on the XUV 700 as well.

BHPian manasr28 recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

The culprit is the Adrenox/Alexa enabled infotainment system. Switch it off manually using its power button before getting out of the car and the issue will not repeat.

Reasoning

I own a 2023 July Z6 Diesel manual and I faced the exact same issue few months back. Car was parked idle for 2 days and the battery was dead. In my case, the multimeter was showing 4 V on the dead battery. The car was not even responding to central lock remote.

Called the Mahindra RSA and got it jump started. The multimeter showed 13+ V on running ingine indicating that alternator was working properly.

I found no sense in getting the car checked by Mahindra because I have lots of after market accessories installed and I know they will blame them for the battery leech.

Next few days went by diagnosing the issue myself. Ruled out Illuminated scuff plate as the same switched off if I manually engage the door lock lever with a screw driver.

All other aftermarket electric accessories are connected to ignition. They get power only if the ignition is ON. There is no way for them to get power when the ignition is OFF.

Moreover, I got those aftermarket accessories installed from my many years of trusted car modification shop on Day 1 of ownership and the car was troublefree for 4 months even when parked without usage for 3 weeks till this peculiar battery drain issue occurred so the after market accessories cannot be blamed.

Then, I started to recall if I did anything unsual before I parked my car.

Then I remembered that I was showing off the Alexa hands-free features of my car to a work colleague before I parked it for 2 days.

The alexa got stuck in executing those commands and was not taking new commands either. Otherwise also, I have found that if alexa is stuck due to any reason, the only way to recover is power off and power on the infotainment sytem using its power button. Switching off the car and switching on again does not work for me.

Also that night, the "last updated" timestamp in the Adrenox mobile app(see attached picture) was changing every few seconds which usually changes only when the car is locked after parking and then remains same till the car is unlocked next time.

A quick google search also showed that many other stock Mahindra Scorpio N's and xuv 700's also faced the same battery drain issue.

Then I stumbled upon this gentleman's youtube video in which he is explaining how the infotainment system was the culprit in his XUV 700 battery drain case which got a software update and the issue got resolved.
It seems that the car's infotainment system is in some sort of deep sleep mode(still ON) even when the ignition is OFF.

From that day, I always keep a note mentally to switch off the infotainment syetem manually using its power button before I kill the engine and thankfully the battery drain issue has not reoccured even when the car was lying idle for 2 weeks in one case. Even took multimeter readings at random during this interval without once starting the engine and the voltage was constant at 12V.

This is the only thing I am doing differently after the battery drain issue occured and so I think its safe to assume that the stuck Adrenox/Alexa enabled infotainment system was the problem in my case.