Early Adopter Mistake - Running on Empty

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Evoforce said:
I hear you on that one. Did they request confirmation of concurrent battery checks or did they not require proof of Annual battery checks at all?

I did submit copies of all battery reports initially so they were with the case from day one. The plan was to leverage them to my benefit, which I think worked out well. I suppose it is reasonable to assume Nissan would try to argue that the warranty is void if reports are missing as they are required by the warranty terms. Would it sway the arbitrator in their direction - that I don't know.
 
Just dropped my 4th bar last week, at roughly 45,150 miles. Dropped the car off at Nissan today to request the battery replacement under warranty, specifically mentioning the class action lawsuit settlement letter I'd received stating that Nissan would be replacing the bad battery with a new 2015 pack. We'll see how it goes.
 
So far so good... service manager said they submitted all the paperwork for the replacement, and that a battery pack ("that's the 2015 pack?" "yes, the updated battery") is ordered... but with a 3 to 6 week ETA.
 
ashnazg said:
So far so good... service manager said they submitted all the paperwork for the replacement, and that a battery pack ("that's the 2015 pack?" "yes, the updated battery") is ordered... but with a 3 to 6 week ETA.

While this topic is somewhat related there is a place better suited for this type of reports:
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=14102
 
I also won the BBB arbitration and now have a new battery pack installed. Nice to have all the bars and range back.

My arbitrator said that Nissan's quote in paperwork that I signed when purchased and Nissan supplied for the arbitration "expect gradual battery loss" and my quote " I am experiencing rapid battery loss" was a major reason I won. Also my last battery checkup at 62,000 miles /down 4 bars showed the battery at "5 out of 5 star level" and he did not understand how a battery losing capacity so quickly could be rated 5 out of 5 stars.
Nissan also talked a lot about the lawsuit in their arbitration hearing and the arbitrator said that that case was about rapid battery capacity loss soon after purchasing or leasing where as I was trying to file a claim about my Lithium-Ion Battery Capacity defect falling under the 8 years/100,000 mile warranty.
Nissan constantly said the 8 year / 100,000 warranty did not apply in my case and kept referring to the class action lawsuit. The arbitrator finally said he did not want to hear another word about the lawsuit as it did not apply to this case.

Battery was supposed to take 4 to 5 weeks to arrive, it took just about 2 weeks to arrive and one day to install.

Anyhow, life with the Leaf is good again, no more stress over the car for my wife and daughter.

Thank you to Leafer77 and Valdemar for all your guidance and suggestions and to the BBB, who made the process fair and easy to follow.
 
hobbyguy said:
I also won the BBB arbitration and now have a new battery pack installed. Nice to have all the bars and range back.
Great news! This gives people who will be just missing out on the capacity warranty a great option to be made whole again. The crazy thing is that if Nissan had designed a reasonable pro-rated warranty based on their original expected battery life claims, this all could have been avoided.

hobbyguy said:
Thank you to Leafer77 and Valdemar for all your guidance and suggestions and to the BBB, who made the process fair and easy to follow.
Yes, thank you all! How long did the process take you from start to finish?
 
The joy of driving on a new battery was quickly spoiled by some moron who missed a red light and T-boned our Leaf last Saturday. Fortunately he could slow down so the impact was not strong enough to cause any injuries but both doors are damaged and there's also some damage to the vertical structural part between the doors (B-pillar?) and below too. Not yet clear if the other party is accepting liability. Hopefully not enough damage to declare it total loss, but the cost of repairs can easily run into $3-4k. Will take it to the body shop I know for a preliminary assessment tomorrow. Sigh.
 
Valdemar said:
The joy of driving on a new battery was quickly spoiled by some moron who missed a red light and T-boned our Leaf last Saturday.
Bummer! Glad to hear injuries were avoided.

This does bring up one thing I'm really curious about. Assuming your car is totaled (I can't imagine it won't be), I'll be very interested to hear how your insurance company figures out the proper replacement value for the car, given its new battery. My guess is they'll do the knee-jerk thing of spitting out a Blue Book value based on model year and miles, but obviously KBB doesn't have a checkbox for "new $6000 battery that makes my car effectively as good as a brand new Leaf."

You might have another BBB arbitration on your hands here... Now what would be really interesting would be how a totaled Leaf might be handled if it had qualified for the warranty but not gotten a replacement yet, or maybe one that was about to qualify. Keep us posted!
 
fooljoe said:
Valdemar said:
The joy of driving on a new battery was quickly spoiled by some moron who missed a red light and T-boned our Leaf last Saturday.
Bummer! Glad to hear injuries were avoided.

This does bring up one thing I'm really curious about. Assuming your car is totaled (I can't imagine it won't be), I'll be very interested to hear how your insurance company figures out the proper replacement value for the car, given its new battery. My guess is they'll do the knee-jerk thing of spitting out a Blue Book value based on model year and miles, but obviously KBB doesn't have a checkbox for "new $6000 battery that makes my car effectively as good as a brand new Leaf."

You might have another BBB arbitration on your hands here... Now what would be really interesting would be how a totaled Leaf might be handled if it had qualified for the warranty but not gotten a replacement yet, or maybe one that was about to qualify. Keep us posted!

I've been curious myself for quite some time how a total loss for an EV with a brand new battery works out and because of it I would probably never buy a new battery out of pocket because this is a high-risk investment with little return. I do have an invoice showing a $6,000 work done which I'm sure I can leverage to some extent in a small claims court or BBB, not exactly sure whose jurisdiction this case would fall into. I previously had a discussion with my insurance regarding a hypothetical total loss case for an EV with a brand new battery. They told me the process for handling such EV specific cases isn't in place yet, but each claim that they have to pay on gets a certain allowance for special circumstances so there should be at least some room for negotiation.

Chances are it won't be declared total loss however, at least this is what my body shop contact thought when I told him the car was worth $6k on the market. Fortunately I now have a dash-cam video of the whole thing which clearly shows it wasn't our fault, so I should at least be able to avoid paying the deductible and rate increase.
 
I filed my first claim at 62,000 miles over a year ago, Feb 2015, direct with Nissan. I filed my second claim direct with Nissan August 2015. I filed with BBB in October 2015 and won in February 2016. I got my new battery in March 2016.

In that year I lost 3 more bars in about 10,000 miles driven. I had some major issues with that battery performance but Nissan rejected
two direct claims, even the second one where I offered to split the new battery charges with them!
 
A quick update. (Details about my case are located in my edited first post.)

Since my battery replacement on September 2015, I'm just over 86,000 miles and I haven't lost a capacity bar.

I'm charging to 100% on the week day's and 80% on the weekend's.
 
Leafer77 said:
A quick update. (Details about my case are located in my edited first post.)

Since my battery replacement on September 2015, I'm just over 86,000 miles and I haven't lost a capacity bar.

I'm charging to 100% on the week day's and 80% on the weekend's.

Another update. I am now over 100,000 miles and I STILL have 12 Capacity Bar's. The replacement battery is working great! I'm still charging 100% during the week and 80% on the weekend.
 
Leafer77 said:
Another update. I am now over 100,000 miles and I STILL have 12 Capacity Bar's. The replacement battery is working great! I'm still charging 100% during the week and 80% on the weekend.
if all 100k of those mile's (pay attention to how us 'Murican's form plural's) were racked up on the replacement battery, that would be very good service indeed. Digging back through the prior post's, it seems the OP's replacement had about a 62kmi head start. Not that 38k mile's without losing any bar's is anything to scoff at anyway..
 
I'm over 30k on the replacement pack since March 2016, 93% SOH, seems like it is an improvement as I was down 1 bar after 33k miles and 21 months on the original pack, and given the dynamics so far I'll likely be over 2 years and 40k miles on the new pack when the bar drops.
 
GetOffYourGas said:
Levenkay said:
pay attention to how us 'Murican's form plural's

This entire post is painful to read. Just because a lot of people do it, does not mean it is correct.
I think he's trying to make a point. None too subtly, but I, too, am pretty tired of misused apostrophes in plurals, although it's easy to slip up and do it now and then by mistake (I almost did so in this sentence!). I blame (without evidence) the origin of this problem on the NYT Stylebook, which says you use an apostrophe to form a plural in an acronym. Why? Is HUD's really more plural-looking than HUDs?
 
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