Battery Warranty Issue with Nissan

knightmb said:

Jedlacks said:

There are also people gaming the system by deliberately wrecking their batteries so that they can get a new one. They come to this board and ask for ideas on what to do. They then go out and do it. When they succeed they are praised, and when they miss the target, they come here and complain. Then all the "Volt lovers" pile on by saying how Nissan sucks.

I was lurking for 3 years before I bought, and now this board is becoming more of a whining site.

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It's just the result of buying a used Leaf where the vehicle is only a few years old but has some type of major capacity loss due to it's location. So, imagine if you bought a used car and it was only a few years old but somehow loss 1/3 of it's gas mileage due to nothing more than the temperature of where it was driven previously. If you game the system and get a new battery, it is like getting a new vehicle. It's no different than driving an ICE and somehow getting a brand new engine at 60k miles by some luck of a recall on the entire engine that allow someone to game it the same way.

Nissan also brings it upon itself in some ways by offering no manufacture supported way to upgrade or fix the batteries via 3rd party. As such, the vehicle feels like a software trap where you buy one version and you must use that one forever with no way to upgrade to a better version in the future. It's the one thing that really contradicts the Nissan resources used to bring the vehicle to market by limiting the ability of it's customers to expand the vehicle beyond it's stock production where it really counts, the battery.

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two things going on here. If you buy a used LEAF unaware of the degradation issues, then it "could be" partially your fault for not understanding what you are getting into. This is not always the case

http://daveinolywa.blogspot.com/2014/11/buyers-beware-this-is-must-read.html

http://daveinolywa.blogspot.com/2014/12/update-saga-of-vin-222-resolved.html

But the other side of the story was 2011/2012 owners who bought on the word of Nissan who stated an estimated 20% loss of capacity after 5 years slowing down to 30% total degradation in 10 years. Well, guess what? There were people exceeding 30% degradation in less than TWO years.

so like... who is gaming who? Nissan wrote the warranty, we didn't....

DaveinOlyWA said:

so like... who is gaming who? Nissan wrote the warranty, we didn't....

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100% Agreed, if the warranty states the vehicle should perform within certain parameters, then we all expect it to, otherwise something is wrong and warranty comes into play.

A few years ago I was at home depot and a guy returned a calcified shower head because it did not work anymore,

Now you and your "buddies" can say anything you all want. Deep down you know you are gaming the system to get a battery for free if you try to accelerate the aging.

Jedlacks said:

A few years ago I was at home depot and a guy returned a calcified shower head because it did not work anymore,

Now you and your "buddies" can say anything you all want. Deep down you know you are gaming the system to get a battery for free if you try to accelerate the aging.

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Sure, but since you're new here, so maybe you don't remember that at ~1:00 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DShtvd5jJHQ, Mark Perry of Nissan claimed that over a 10-year life, you'll have about 70 to 80% remaining capacity. This was before there was ANY capacity warranty.

And from https://www.wired.com/2010/01/nissan-leaf-2/

Mark Perry, Nissan’s director of product planning for the United States, dismissed the importance of active thermal management.

“We don’t need thermal management for the U.S., but we are looking at the technology for Dubai and other locations like that…. We’ve gone on the record saying that the pack has a 70 to 80 percent capacity after 10 years,” he told Wired.com. Pressed on whether that is realistic for a passively cooled manganese oxide pack, Perry said yes.

“If it wasn’t our pack and it wasn’t our engineers and we weren’t working on it for 17 years … we wouldn’t make the statement if we weren’t confident in our ability to do so,” he said.

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But things reared their head when http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=8802 started. By the time TonyWilliams' range test happened: http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=228326, there were 3 and 4 capacity bar (~30% loss) losers in Phoenix when the Leaf had only been out about 21 months.

Summary at http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=9694.

If Leaf batteries actually did have 70 to 80% remaining capacity after 10 years and actually didn't need thermal management (i.e. could have 70% left even in Phoenix at 10 years), I don't think we'd be having this discussion or people accelerating aging to hit the 5 year/60K 4 BL capacity warranty threshold that came about due to the Klee class action settelement.

+1

cwerdna said:

If Leaf batteries actually did have 70 to 80% remaining capacity after 10 years and actually didn't need thermal management (i.e. could have 70% left even in Phoenix at 10 years), I don't think we'd be having this discussion or people accelerating aging to hit the 5 year/60K 4 BL capacity warranty threshold that came about due to the Klee class action settlement.

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Jedlacks said:

... Deep down you know you are gaming the system to get a battery for free if you try to accelerate the aging.

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NO.

I don't like people gaming Lands End and other companies expecting replacement of end of life products.

But Nissan is the one that gamed the customer with a defective product that didn't come close to what they said it would do.
The marketing people gamed them with false assertions of 100 mile range.

And then Nissan accountants and attornies gamed them with an inadequate non-prorated capacity warranty that gamed the results of the class action lawsuit system taking advantage of the two incompetent plaintiffs and their incompetent council.

And they had excellent advice from the LEAF Advisory Board instructing them on how stupid and incompetent this was. But they never listened to them on anything other than improvements to future products.

Completely disregarded how they should treat customers with Gen 1 and Gen1A.

99% of the gaming of the system was by Nissan.

Jedlacks said:

Deep down you know you are gaming the system to get a battery for free if you try to accelerate the aging.

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No, sorry, but deep down I don't feel sorry at all if the way I treated my battery accelerated the capacity degradation. Like most owners, for the first couple years I was overly cautious with charging, 80% only, never left it sit at 100%, only DC charged once or twice, only to find out that Nissan launched the Leaf with a defective battery chemistry, so all my caution was just a waste in the heat of south Florida. Then, as TimLee said above, Nissan continued to avoid admitting guilt by settling the Klee Class Action suit with the capacity loss bar set so high that most Leaf owners will never be able to take advantage of it.
Jedlacks, you need to understand that its not a matter of "if" your 2011/2012 battery will degrade below 66%, its just a matter of "when". Let's just say that the way I charged my Leaf for the past year or 2 did accelerate the degradation, and then lets assume that I wouldn't have lost 34% of my capacity until a month, 2 months, or even a year past my 5 year warranty. So now, here a beautiful 2012 Leaf sits, valued at $7,000 by KBB, with <50 miles of range, and a $6,000 bill to convert it back into something usable to that tiny niche of EV buyers in my area. What are my chances of ever being able to sell it (to help pay for my Model 3)?
Feel guilty for gaming the system? No way. I personally feel that Nissan should give EVERY 2011/2012 owner a new battery, to give us what we were promised when we bought the car. The ones that are REALLY being gamed are the poor guys that come on here a few days, a month, or even a couple months past the 5 year mark, and have been denied a new battery. As others have said, I'm done with Nissan.

keydiver said:

I personally feel that Nissan should give EVERY 2011/2012 owner a new battery, to give us what we were promised when we bought the car. The ones that are REALLY being gamed are the poor guys that come on here a few days, a month, or even a couple months past the 5 year mark, and have been denied a new battery. As others have said, I'm done with Nissan.

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I agree 100%. In addition the larger battery that actually goes 100 miles in general conditions should be given to all of 2011/2012 owners.
I honestly think Nissan set the EV movement back five years with this defective battery.

Besides, it's not clear that the things that people are trying (running the battery down, charging to 100%, quick charging) are actually making much of a difference...and none of them are outside the normal use of the car. In fact, they are all natural consequences of having a degraded battery and still trying to get to all the places you used to go to.