Warranty confusion - Help!

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sciencegirl

Member
Joined
Apr 16, 2017
Messages
14
I am a teacher with a dream and a budget. I can buy a CPO 2013 from a NIssan dealer for 9k or and equivalent car from a little roadside, independent used car dealer for 8K. Both cars have about 40k miles on them.

So, I thought - no brainer, save 1k and get the 8k one, right?

According to the carfax on the 8K car - I would be the 3rd owner. I read somewhere (I am on Leaf info overload and it's starting to just melt my brain) - that the warranty is transferable to the second owner.

Does this mean that if I'm the 3rd owner, my battery won't be covered for the remainder of the 96/100k battery warranty?

Help!
 
Indeed I am very green to this (pun intended).

One car has a manufacture date of 10/1/13 the other 11/14/13. I will be looking at each car over the next few days.
I"ll see the max charge/bars each is getting and miles.

I don't imagine either dealer would allow me to use Leafspy, would they?

What else should I do?

There's also a 2014 with a manufacture date of 2/14 that I might consider, but figured with that date of manu, I may as well lump it in as equivalent with the other two.

My apologies for what may be newbie questions - I am indeed a newbie and am experiencing information overload.
 
The dealership I bought from was fine with me using LeafSpy and the other I was in talks with was willing to send me the LeafSpy data before I even saw the car. It doesn't hurt to ask, but it does hurt to not ask.
 
Be devious: tell the dealership you want to verify that the car does not have any engine codes (which should also be true.) Plug in your obdII adapter and read it with LeafSpy.

The non LeafSpy approach is to use a test drive to evaluate the battery health:
Charge up the car to 80% SoC;
Reset the trip meter so you know the miles/kWh for your test drive;
Note the start odometer;
Go for a 30ish mile drive (more is better)
Note the end SoC
Note the end odometer reading

Start with these values from the trip
delta_soc
trip_miles
Miles_per_kWh

Calculate kWh_used: trip_miles / miles_per_kWh
Then calculate delta_soc / kWh_used. A new car is ~ 4.5% SoC per kWh

The lower the better. The ratio between two cars shows the relative battery health between them
Regarding the trip: longer is better; and best to start with the same-ish SoC in each car and drive ~ the same distance.
 
sciencegirl said:
Indeed I am very green to this (pun intended).

One car has a manufacture date of 10/1/13 the other 11/14/13. I will be looking at each car over the next few days.
I"ll see the max charge/bars each is getting and miles.

I don't imagine either dealer would allow me to use Leafspy, would they?

What else should I do?

There's also a 2014 with a manufacture date of 2/14 that I might consider, but figured with that date of manu, I may as well lump it in as equivalent with the other two.

My apologies for what may be newbie questions - I am indeed a newbie and am experiencing information overload.

Having been bitten by this, I would prefer the 2013's over the 2014 model, since they took away the 80% charge limiter starting in 2014. Nissan is convinced that it's fine to charge to 100% on a daily basis and manually limiting your charge on days when you might not drive it. I prefer the piece-of-mind of plug-it-and-forget-it, because I have a few weekends when I don't drive more than only a few miles and am too lazy to unplug on those days. So this really depends on your driving routine.
 
Going by manufacture date, both cars are fine. They also both avoided the Hot Summer of 2013. If both show 12 capacity bars, assume 11 bars plus a little for both. If there is no reason to suspect tampering with the capacity reading, pick the car you prefer.
 
First, the warranty issue. Original bumper to bumper warranty is 36 months, 36,000 miles. The degradation warranty for the main battery pack is 60/60k. The battery defect warranty (not likely to apply) is 96/100k. Due to their age, the degradation warranty is the only one to worry about at this time. As long as the car does not have a salvage title, the original warranties apply to any owner of the vehicle.

Most dealers are not concerned with the use of Leaf Spy. If they are, you probably don't want to deal with them. Leaf Spy tells you a lot about the health of the battery, but the output is not officially recognized by Nissan as being useful for anything. The numbers to be concerned with are AHr, SOH, and Hx. The higher the numbers, the better. Get a CarFax, or something that shows where the car has spent its life. Avoid anything has has been in a warmer, or hot, climate (Florida, Arizona, Nevada, etc.). This is a big factor affecting the life of the main battery.

Don't let the removal of the 80% charge option sway you. It is okay to charge to 100% every time. In fact, it needs done on a regular basis to balance the cells in the main battery pack. What is not okay is to let the battery sit at 100% charge (or below 20%) for extended periods of time, especially in hot weather. What works well, for many, is to use the charge timer so the car is ready to go within an hour or two of departure. As long as the commute gets the charge level down near 80% (or below), sitting at work all day should not be an issue.
 
Don't let the removal of the 80% charge option sway you. It is okay to charge to 100% every time. In fact, it needs done on a regular basis to balance the cells in the main battery pack. What is not okay is to let the battery sit at 100% charge (or below 20%) for extended periods of time, especially in hot weather. What works well, for many, is to use the charge timer so the car is ready to go within an hour or two of departure. As long as the commute gets the charge level down near 80% (or below), sitting at work all day should not be an issue.

It's so much more convenient to be able to have my car set to charge to 80% normally, and to 100% when I press Timer Override, that I can't agree with the above. The only situation in which I don't see the 80% option not mattering is one in which the car needs to be charged to 100% anyway on most days.
 
By the way, OP:
How may miles a day will you drive the LEAF between charges ?
What is the minimum time the car has to last ?
How severe a winter do you have ?

My wife and I are happy with our LEAF as a second car used locally, but it is not good for much more than that and the battery degrades by the month. Do your homework to be sure the car fits your requirements now and down the road.
 
I didn't expect many to respond to my first post - thank you all for taking the time. I hope to be a frequent visitor as soon as I get my own baby. I'm going to push my luck since I have your attention and ask away ....


I did get a carfax - clean titles and both cars have spent their lives in New Jersey, where I currently (pun) live. Summers get hot here but no long stretches above 90 - avg btwn 65-85F. The 2014 I mentioned earlier spent it's life in Boston, another reason I put that car third on my preference)

Winters are my worry. Anyone with two cents worth on worst case scenario ranges in tri-state area winter
in which January is the coldest month with temps avg upper 30's to lower 40's. Otherwise temp avg. for the year is 55F?
 
The heatpump-equipped cars (SV and SL) should get about 60-65 miles of range in Winter weather above 25F, and more like 47-55 miles in frigid weather. I have a 2013 with about 86% capacity, and those are my figures for upstate NY.
 
sciencegirl said:
Winters are my worry. Anyone with two cents worth on worst case scenario ranges in tri-state area winter
in which January is the coldest month with temps avg upper 30's to lower 40's. Otherwise temp avg. for the year is 55F?
A lot depends on how you use heating and how much defrost (an energy hog!) is required.

We live in Colorado where the air is dry enough to not require a lot of defrost use, and we minimize heater use by pre-heating the car in the garage before a drive and using seat heat, gloves, and warm clothes rather than cabin heat. All told our winter range loss is ~ 10% compared to balmy weather but it could easily be 40% if our behaviours were different and the car lived outside.

Another confounding factor to consider is that the battery will take up less energy during a charge as the battery temperature decreases in the winter, and battery resistance increases as its temperature drops, adding another inefficiency to winter driving.
 
Durandal said:
Warranty is irrespective of the number of owners, so all other things the same, the number of owners is irrelevant.

Maybe for Nissan, but not for all brands. For example, Hyundai's 10 year/100k miles powertrain warranty only applies to the original owner, or a second owner IF the car was sold as an official Hyundai Certified Pre-Owned. Otherwise, after the car is sold off by its original owner, the powertrain warranty drops to the typical 5 year/60k miles.

https://www.autotrader.com/car-tips/buying-a-car-is-the-factory-warranty-transferable-228454
 
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