Andy expressed the expectation from Nissan that the majority of customers would lease leaving Nissan carrying the burden of the battery technology durability. I've read numbers as high as 70% of customers buying vs leasing.
Response to below: I doubt the law requires consent each time to send personal data to Nissan. One consent per person should be enough. Since the car has no way of knowing who the driver is, and the data is personal to the driver, not the car, then the car has to ask for consent each time to ensure compliance with the law. The LEAF most likely sends much more information to Nissan than location, and Nissan stores the information, perhaps permanently, and uses it for lots of its own purposes.
His logic is flawed though since the length of the lease does not cover the life of the vehicle so while Nissan takes the initial burden once the lease is over either the original owner who buys the car or the next owner take on the rest of the risk. For Nissan to actually take on the risk of battery capacity they need to offer a real capacity warranty.
I'm not at all convinced that there is a US privacy law that prohibits the LEAF from sending whatever data it sends back without that warning everytime. I would like this issue to be pressed resulting in an actual response that provides a legal analysis of the issue. If lo-jack, my cell phone, and OnStar can all send GPS coordinates without me consenting every time I turn them on then either they are leaving themselves open to liability or Nissan's assessment is wrong. I would like further in depth clarification on this.
I think Nissan needs to seriously consider providing the raw number for SOC and capacity. It would go a long way in providing accurate feedback to owners concerned about their packs. If there is a reason for not having this then make the case to us. After seeing that my battery loss is less than a couple to a few percent after a year and 10,000 miles I am very pleased. Sure this might be too variable to display right on the dash but forcing consumers to build custom devices to read CANBus messes for this information is not the solution.
I would like to see Nissan respond properly to saintyohann's issue and provide us and them an explanation for how the issue got this far.
I think the comments from Jeff and this video are an amazing first set of steps in fixing our relationship but I don't expect Chelsea to be content with the answers that Andy provided. We are going to need a lot more technical information and concrete answers. I have very high expectations of Nissan and am optimistic that Nissan can start meeting them.