SageBrush said:
Over $300 a kWh. Not including installation costs
For another POS battery that lasts ~ 5 years or 60k miles
About $130 a month instead of sending the car to the junkyard. That does not sound terrible, just not great for a local only car.
Or about 13 cents a mile to keep running the car. Again, not terrible but not great.
The real pain was to whomever paid the new car price, and the negative comments about the replacement cost mostly reflect acknowledgement that they are not getting a break after paying so much up front.
We bought a used 2012 Leaf that looked to be in nearly immaculate condition from a Nissan dealership. It had very low mileage, too. However, despite the full bar charge ability and 100+ mile claimed range, we quickly discovered that the range estimate wasn't even close to reasonably accurate. Not too long after getting the car we had to have it towed to the dealership because the mileage tanked very badly and then the car wouldn't run. Nissan sent it to like three different dealerships and it took forever to get it back. But, when we did get it back, the battery supposedly having been fixed due to the vehicle having less than 30,000 miles on it, the range was even more inaccurate. It initially claimed almost as much range as when we had gotten the car but would plummet drastically. Now, not a very long time after this "repair" we have to charge the car at least every 48 hours to make the trip to work and back, a few miles away. The range meter is a big fat lie and the battery repair appears to have only managed to get the car to start up and run. I don't think they did anything besides replace the completely dead cells. The extremely degraded ones must have just been papered-over and the software is designed to pretend that they hold some kind of decent charge.
So, the claims about 60,000 mile lifespan aren't even close to accurate. And, this is the 2012 which is, according to Consumer Reports' data (at least at the time we researched for purchasing), is the last very reliable year (because it was still made in Japan). The battery technology is apparently very poor-quality. There is no excuse for not making it easy for third parties to provide replacement packs if Nissan can't manage to produce affordable and reliable replacements themselves. I am completely uninterested in reading theorizing about why it's just fine for Nissan to handle the Leaf so deplorably.
I also completely agree with the demand, too, to be able to turn off that terrible startup nag screen, especially since the wifi system is so outdated that the vehicle isn't even using it.
I want to love our 2012 Leaf, especially since it had a less ridiculously aggressive fascia than most recent vehicles, but my spouse is very irritated and I am seeing things his way lately. We were already scammed by VW with a diesel Passat, which we purchased new (endless repairs plus scam repairs and dealership lies... also toxic nanoparticles from the emissions system that have very likely contributed to my chronic bronchitis). It seems that whenever the consumer makes an effort to save money on fuel and help the environment the consumer ends up being stabbed in the back.
Not only should third party packs be able to be made available for reasonable prices and with reliability, the vehicle should have absolutely no reason why it can't be adapted to more recent higher-capacity cells. But, I would be fine with a true 100 mile range, or even a true 70 mile range. I am not happy with a 12 mile range that says 84 miles when you pull out of the garage after a charge. That is not hyperbole. With the heater running it may be even less than that. At the rate the range is degrading we're going to have a car that won't even be able to be driven to work and back (only a few miles away) soon. And, we're still paying on the car loan until 2020!!!
ABSOLUTLELY DEPLORABLE AND DISGUSTING SITUATION.
P.S. The local Nissan dealer has been pestering us continually to trade the vehicle in. You don't want to know how little they're offering — and that's without us having told them about the inexcusable condition of the battery pack they barely repaired at all. Our car is a ticking time bomb and it's time is almost up. We're probably be paying for a year on a car that has to be charged daily to crawl a few miles. I don't remember how many miles are on the car now... maybe 40K. It's not much. Our '99 Saturn LS-1 was a vastly better buy. That thing is still on the road and it has a huge amount of miles on it.
It figures that the shadiest companies like VW are heavily trying to push EVs. Companies adore speeding up planned obsolescence, like Apple with its iPhone battery fiasco. We both had iPhone 5s that prematurely failed because of battery problems. Neither were covered by any kind of replacement discount. Apple told my spouse to buy a new phone when the battery bulged out. FIll up the landfills and max out today's terrible credit cards. He used to have a BoA (for many many many years) card. It was his first and BoA extended the credit limit to 30K. Even though his credit score kept increasing and was the highest it had ever been (820 or something), BoA cancelled the card without warning and with no attempt at justification. The banks want everyone to have higher interest cards with low limits so they can hit people with penalties if they max out.
Remember inkjet printers? Once upon a time they were built to last. Then Epson realized it could make print heads that clog and kill the machine. HP realized the ink could be priced into the stratosphere and people would pay it to avoid the clogged printhead problem. Apple pioneered quickly breaking backward compatibility with OS "updates". Microsoft is now doing the same thing. I have a pile of software that won't work in Windows 10. Hostility toward the consumer is increasing and that is what planned obolescence is.
SageBrush said:
Buy an older leaf with high(er) miles and a good battery for cheap.
I'd look for 2013/4 with 40k miles and 12 bars capacity. Pay $6 - 7k
In 3 years you might be able to sell your future 10 bar LEAF for $4k
Don't count on it.
The bars mean nothing. Ours was full when we bought it and that barely lasted any time at all. We lost a bar. Then another. Then the car wouldn't run at all. Then it was "repaired". Now, it barely has any usable capacity — despite ridiculous claims of total mileage with a full charge. The bars and the mileage claim meter are both smoke and mirrors.
SageBrush said:
No complaints from me though -- I like $8k, lightly used cars.
This is illusion. When a car can't even manage to run properly when it had less than 30K miles on it and can't run properly when it has been "repaired" by the dealerships' experts then "lightly used" doesn't apply. These batteries are, from what I can tell, defective. Or, the car design that's using them is defective. Or both.
People have been mentioning a lack of active cooling. Well, the 2012 model, I've read, added some cooling. It's active in that air moves over the batteries when the car is in motion, correct? It does, indeed, seem sketchy for them to have added that cooling for the 2012 model without changing the design. It appears to be an admission of design failure for the pre-2012 models.
And, given the horrible battery performance in our 2012...
Valdemar said:
Welcome to the real EV total cost of ownership.
We can thank Consumer Reports for lying to us. It claimed the Leaf cost so little per mile to drive. What a flat out lie. That company should be folded. It's so unreliable that it's basically as scam, too. The top-rated GE fridge we bought lasted just until out of warranty and not even the repairman could get it to work. The same goes for the top-rated GE dryer. Etc. Etc.
Usaverageguy said:
Yes. Buying a new car is more expensive than replacing the battery
Not really. Do the math on our car. It is going to cost us more to replace the battery in it than buying a different vehicle would cost us. I'll get the actual mileage on the car this morning and the mileage it was at when we bought it and the mileage it was at when it was "repaired", so people can see how well the 60K estimate holds up.
Also, I have to say that I have zero faith that these insanely overpriced replacement batteries from Nissan will provide the same range as an original factory-installed pack, given the utterly unacceptable performance of the warranty repair I received. It is my expectation that people will get a lot more smoke and mirrors for their hard-earned cash.
DaveinOlyWA said:
Don't discharge below 15% and don't charge over 90% as much as possible and it will make a lot of difference.
Nissan removed the charge level protection cap for the 2012 model. Gee, I wonder why... (The company claimed that the protection benefit was negligible.)
webb14leafs said:
I'm not ready to skewer Nissan just yet. There are worse things than being a victim of early adoption issues.
This "early adopter" excuse is ridiculous. It has nothing to do with intentionally anti-consumer business practices, which is what we're discussing. Our 2012 car wasn't a case of early adopter anything.
DaveinOlyWA said:
the refurbished options won't give you a 100% pack but hard to beat the price especially if you are using old tech packs with 5 or 6 bars down.
Refurbished implies the reuse of Nissan's pack design. Using some other kind of cell is not refurbishment it is replacement. I would run away from refurbished Nissan cells unless they were dirt cheap.
tattoogunman said:
I talked to someone who said that new EPA guidelines are going to prevent Nissan from implementing the refurbished pack program in the U.S. I don't have anything to back that up, but just as an FYI
The EPA excuse strikes me as being complete nonsense. If Nissan is claiming this it's probably relying on ordinary people to not fact-check it. What could the excuse possibly be?
The EPA would be happy for people to continue to use batteries rather than send them to a landfill. Lithium battery production has a non-negligible ecological impact.
Some comments here also indicate that some have been programmed by the extreme "speed up planned obsolescence to the nth degree" corporate indoctrination campaign. For a reality check, there are AMC Pacers on Ebay that are still running well. Yes, cars from the 1970s that weren't even luxury models. People need to recalibrate their expectations for car lifespan radically. GM thought its exploding Pintos were fine (literally saved a few bucks by designing the car to be unsafe) but consumers said otherwise when they found out. It's time for consumers to think harder about this battery scam. The disposable electronic gadgets (including the relentless wasteful television size upgrading) people have grown accustomed to are warping people's ideas about what minimal acceptable car lifespan is.