Should I buy a used 2016 SV/SL? Anything to be scared of or check for?

Looking at a few from big Nissan dealerships only. Clean title only. All have around 20-30k miles and are from 11k to 17k.

What should I be concerned about? I don't need FULL range, but I would like over 80 miles for sure. Anything to check for? (and how?)

mattsk42 said:

Looking at a few from big Nissan dealerships only. Clean title only. All have around 20-30k miles and are from 11k to 17k.

What should I be concerned about? I don't need FULL range, but I would like over 80 miles for sure. Anything to check for? (and how?)

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Look for one built IN 2016 - preferably AFTER January. The early builds have had a relatively high incidence of bad battery cell issues. And then there is the rapid capacity loss found with many of them, that may (or possibly may not) have been fixed by a Nissan software update. Still, 80 miles of range is about where Nissan will replace the battery if it loses more than four capacity bars within 8 years or 100,000 miles.

before you buy, get a 20$ OBD2 dongle and the leafspy app. Any car that you like, plug in the dongle and scan the battery and check battery health. Buy one that you will find with the highest health. You should still be able to find them in the 90+% SOH range (depending on how hot of a state you live in).

For what it’s worth our 2016 SV hasn’t had a single issue. We don’t have Leaf Spy so no clue on battery health however once a month we do a trip of about 120 Km to a neighbouring town. When we first got it we had about 50 km left on the guess-o-meter. Now we have about 40. This is in zero degree Celsius weather. We don’t use heat much as it gets to warm when all dressed for winter. We use heated seats and steering wheel instead. Slow highway though so that helps. Like max 90 km/h.

Great car. Keeping this one and buying an EPlus next year.

How many miles are you expecting to do each year?

I recently purchased 2016 SV that had over 60k miles on it. It was inexpensive because of the number of miles and battery was at 10 bars (it already had the battery firmware update).

But I have over 5 years left on its 8 year battery warranty and expect to put less than 5k miles per year - so will be under 100k mile at the 8 year warranty mark.

So I played a slightly different angle - am I covered for 5 years for battery health? Still at 10 bars and about 21 kWh capacity according to LeafSpy Pro. Will see how it turns out...

I also purchased LeafSpy Pro and dongle prior to Leaf shopping.

So I played a slightly different angle - am I covered for 5 years for battery health? Still at 10 bars and about 21 kWh capacity according to LeafSpy Pro. Will see how it turns out...

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You have roughly 5 years of capacity warranty left, depending on the original "In Service" date. The capacity warranty is 8 years or 100k miles on the 30kwh pack. (I think this makes the capacity and defect warranties identical on the 30kwh cars.)

I would make sure you get this, from the service manual, page 9. I had to pull this out to get the 24 month report completed "at no cost".

EV Battery Usage Report
To maximize the life of your Li-ion battery, have the EV Battery Usage Report generated and reviewed with
you. Review of the EV Battery Usage Report is required as a condition of
EV battery warranty. Refer to your 2016 LEAF warranty information
booklet for details. Both the 12 month and 24 month inspections will be performed by your Nissan LEAF certified
dealer at no cost to the vehicle owner.


Other than that, I agree with getting the leafspy report off the ODB2 port as well. My SOH (purchased Jan 2017) is 93.22% at 18000 miles.