Neutered Sputniks

Mine's lasted close to a year. No problems - in fact, I've used it to jump both my truck and my bike...

NFRs2000NYC

The 51R did indeed have a lot of QC issues. Oddly enough, I am the ONLY person on S2ki that had a good one. My first 51R lasted almost 4 years of heavy cycling, and 4 season weather, and my current one is 2 years old, and is still holding up well.

However, with that in mind, I find it impossible to recommend, since we had SO MANY failures on this board, that I would say get something else. Also, for the turbo boys, I like dry cell batteries, in case they melt, you don't have acid leaking everywhere.

CitadelBlue

Soooooooooooooooo ... for the average owner ....... what does everyone recommend ...... the Kirkland brand (from COSTCO) , MAX (from Wall-Mart), DieHart (from Sears) .....some else?

RS2000

The S should be using the 51D, I have the Yellow since 2006, 25k miles, and sometimes left the car off for 1-2 weeks. Still going strong. I got a battery tender recently and took about 1 hr to top it off, which is pretty good.

I'd be curious to know if there really is a Q/C problem with these batteries. I haven't come across solid data support that.

delliot

I had one several years ago... it lasted 13 months! The stock Honda battery lasted over 5 years with no problems, till the end...
I replaced the Ultima with a diehard. No probs so far after 3 years....