Battery

Three years after I bought the 308, the battery was having to be recharged before I could use it.  The alarm system draws some power even with the key off, so that was killing the old battery.  After reading quite a bit, I decided to get an Optima red top battery as the descriptions sounded like it would keep a charge for much longer even with the alarm system drawing power.

After a couple of months , the Optima was needing a periodic recharge, so I hard wired in leads for a Battery Tender and ran the plug out the opening near the left headlight by the spare tire tub.  This way, I could just sit the Battery Tender in the spare tire well and keep it plugged in, yet easily remove it when I wanted to drive the car.  Within a year of purchase of the Optima, the Optima would not charge up using a regular charger and the Battery Tender died at the same time .  Since the battery was still under warranty, I shipped it back to Ohio (I bought it online) at my expense.  They replaced it with a new one, which worked for the next six years, though I was keeping a Battery Tender on it whenever the car was not in use.  BTW, Battery Tender also replaced the unit under their lifetime warranty.

Then, the Battery Tender was showing the Optima to be charged, but there wasn't enough power in the battery to turn the engine over fast enough to start the car.  Nor would a regular charger work.  There have been many threads on Ferrari Chat about the poor quality of Optimas.  I followed the charging method in one of the FC threads, posted by an Optima employee.  Basically it said to put another battery in parallel with the Optima when charging, otherwise a battery charger wouldn't necessarily charge a fully discharged Optima.  Tried that twice and never got the Optima to charge up.  From what I've read, the original Optimas were quite good, but the company was bought out and quality has suffered since.

So today, I went over to Costco and bought a replacement wet cell normal battery.  They don't have the 34R size that fits the 308 exactly, but the size 35 that they do have is close.  It isn't as long, but an inch taller.  That inch required me to turn the battery so the connections would be at the rear, otherwise the battery cover under the spare tire would touch.  The only problem with turning it around is now the + and - connections are on the wrong sides.  The positive cable is long enough to reach, but the ground cable was too short.  I replaced it with a generic 24" ground cable.  At the same time, I kept the permanent wiring for the Battery Tender in place.

That battery failed in less than a year, so I took it back to Costco and got a size xxx, which fit better.  I was able to put the original ground cable back in the car.