problem with 12v battery?

[jjeff]

In other cars in the past I have used a 9 volt battery Gizmo plugged into the lighter socket to hold radio settings while I changed the battery. Would that help with this, or is it a totally different animal?

The problem with that is the Leaf's 12v lighter socket goes dead when the car is turned off, so the 9v wouldn't have any way to make it back to the car's computer. I suppose you could take a 12v battery and wire it to a always hot point in the fuse box, or near where the 12v battery connects to the car but I'm not sure how the 9v would work. For one thing as soon as you connected your 12v battery back up, it would put 12v and a potential high amperage directly across the 9v battery.....now maybe this wouldn't hurt the 9v, after all the same thing would happen with a always hot cig lighter but personally I'd use a 12v battery and one bigger than the minuscule 9v as any draw and it would go even lower than 9v at which point it wouldn't really back up the cars computer.

 

[Bob]

To the original poster:

It sounds like some electronic unit in your car is defective, but it may require trial-and-error for the service tech to figure it out. That can be painfully slow because most dealers don't keep Leaf electronic modules in stock.

My advice is to keep complaining until it gets fixed consistently. In general, the Leaf is a very reliable car, but it does have a ton of electronics in it (perhaps not literally a ton, but certainly many hundreds of pounds of electronics), and once in a while, a module will go bad. It might be because the module case is damaged and allowing water in, or it might just be a random intermittent failure of a component.

Please let us know what finally solves this problem for you.

Bob

 

[Nubo]

This is bizarre to me. I grilled the service tech at the dealership and he swore up and down that he had to enter codes through his computer after changing the 12 volt battery. I was pretty frustrated, since I had let the car sit overnight without a battery and ended up having to have it towed to the dealer when I couldn't get it into gear. They covered the tow and the battery, so it cost me nothing but inconvenience, but why would the codes not clear themselves? I also every other day or so get the yellow warning light telling me that there is something wrong, but The dealer found nothing so I basically ignore it, or restart the car to make it go away.

Once the vehicle experiences a low 12V battery event, it can spawn over a couple of dozen different error codes, not all of which are automatically reset. The Leaf Spy app will allow you to clear them without docking with the mother ship.

 

[DanDietrich]

Well, the dealer has had the car for over a week. They said they might have to drop the main battery and talk to Nissan. I called today and they said the exact same thing. They may have done nothing, or maybe there is one call a day to Nissan, I don't know. They gave me an Altima that I hate, but I thought they would be in a hurry to get it back at least.