My Nissan Leaf Forum

And therein lies the problem since the amount of actual energy per fuel bar is variable and dependent on many factors. Thus, without something like a Gid meter, you really still don't know what you have to work with...

IMHO, there's no way in hell that Nissan's SOC display will reveal anything about battery degradation. The battery capacity bars don't show anything until 15% loss and even that's giving them grief.

the SOC display will be adjusted so that an 80% change will show 80% and a 100% charge will show 100% regardless of the capacity loss. They already have this on the EV CAN bus, the 55B message. All they need to do is adjust the numbers between 80 and 95 so that 95 will read out as 100%.

Question, since our dash displays are digital, can any type of software update from Nissan change the GOM and bars to read something like what they may be having in the 2013 models?

Just a thought or are we stuck with what we have forever.

Ian B

It is certainly possible but also highly unlikely...

I got my Leaf last Friday and realize everything is good except for range figure jumping all over the place. I am OK with it, just not my wife. That really scares her! She just doesn't have the mood to understand my explanation of kWh and bars ...

I too hope there is a software update to add 2013's battery percentage or kWh remaining ... simple effective.

WattsLeft meter

I should point out that 99% of gasoline vehicles do not tell you how many gallons (or liters) of gasoline remain in the tank. So it is really not much different for an EV.

I do think Nissan took the wrong approach to the fuel gauge, especially in regards to degradation. What they should have done is to give you bars each representing 1 Kwh available in the battery. As the battery degrades over time, you'll notice after each charge that the bars off of the top are missing.

I think this is very important because if a person were to switch between two different Leafs with different capacities, the bars will disappear faster one one car than the other, making it more difficult to judge. Also I think a lot of drivers will not realize what the function or purpose of those "capacity bars" are and thus may not realize their car has less range than it had when it was new, thus possibly getting them stranded trying to take a route they know they were wable to take in the past. But if the battery gauge was a linear representation of Kwh remaining, then there would be uniform behavior between all Leafs and those with less capacity would be obvious.

On that same token.. I wish they'd show KW usage on the energy bubbles at the top. I know you can get this info on one of the screens on the NAV unit, but why not make it more obvious how many KW each bubble represents?

As I understood MY2013 will have absolutely same display - nothing new from HW point of view. Percentage will be displayed in common menu (where everything can be displayed if it is programmed). So only firmware will be different. Meaning we just need to update firmware to 2013's years version. The question is will it be supported officially?

There were rumors that Nissan is using a different microprocessor in the display in the MY'13, maybe as a cost-cutting measure. If so, the MY13 firmware may not work on an earlier model.

The SOC% does NOT tell you how many available kWh's are available to you. It merely tells you what percentage of full the battery is.

If the battery were degraded by one half, with 10.5kWh available, and fully charged, you would have 100% shown on the SOC meter.

However, the Gid count will likely reflect 50% (140 value).

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The new 2013 will show 100% SOC, regardless of capacity, when fully charged, and the following:

kWh----------Gid----Gid%---Gid2%---2013 dash % (2013 dash % data based on SOC %, not Gids)
21.0--Full----281---100%---100%----100% (non-degraded at 70F; 21kWh usable)
10.5--Half----144--51.2%----50%----50% (non-degraded at 70F; 10.5kWh usable)
10.5--Full***--144--51.2%----50%----100% (***used 50% degraded at 70F; 10.5kWh usable)
3.2---LBW----49---17.4%---15.3%----15% (2013 data on a new car, unknown for degraded)
1.3---VLB----24----8.6%-----6.2%----5% (2013 data on a new car, unknown for degraded)
0.0---Turtle --7-----2.5%-----0%-----0% (2013 data on a new car, unknown for degraded)

NOTE: LBW and VLB are indexed to Gids, therefore those values won't match the SOC derived data of the 2013 dash % with a degraded battery.

Turtle is not indexed to Gids, therefore under a high load, like freeway speed, expect turtle at 7 or 8 Gids, and at extremely low power, as low as 4 Gids to Turtle.