2016 Nissan LEAF Information - 30 kWh SV/SL, 24 kWh S

[ydnas7]

if Nissan refuses to offer a true warranty I must assume that's because they have analyzed their wealth of test and real-world use data, and determined there is unacceptably high risk of rapid degradation and so they will not assume that financial risk. In that case, neither will I.

yes, but they will accept that risk on a lease.

The corollary of that is that if Nissan has analyzed their wealth of test and real-world :lol: use data, and determined that more people would buy their EV with an extra 6-8kwH of battery capacity instead of increased longevity. As Nissan had priory stated that in general (ie globally) swapping scope from battery capacity to battery longevity would've decreased the range available in a general basis (ie globally). Which is to say, users in the northern states of USA, EU and Japan would be paying with reduced range for the increased longevity of other USA users.

 

[evnow]

I don't think Nissan will offer better warranty until they have more data.

In general, warranty is to cover those 5 or 10% unfortunate buyers who happened to buy outliers. One can do that only after sufficient data is available.

BTW, just because a manufacturer knows their products well and is highly reliant doesn't mean they'll offer better warranty. Toyota doesn't offer better warranty than Kia, for eg.

 

[ishiyakazuo]

BTW, just because a manufacturer knows their products well and is highly reliant doesn't mean they'll offer better warranty. Toyota doesn't offer better warranty than Kia, for eg.

That's true, but Hyundai/Kia offers the longer warranty because Hyundai/Kia was seen as not very reliable by many, so they said, "Fine, we'll offer a warranty to offer the piece of mind that our brand name doesn't." I think the bottom line is, if Nissan sees that the sales of the LEAF are suffering because of something, they'll probably try to react to that. They likely won't be too proactive about anything that they don't have to be.

 

[tkdbrusco]

I'd say that they up the warranty to something around 100,000mi just to have a good solid number. Maybe 9 bars at 100,000K, but in doing this they will also increase the buffer within the pack so that there is unused capacity that becomes used capacity at a certain point, or gradually rolls in as the battery degrades. This way what they are really promising is about 8 bars of capacity, but it appears like it is 9 bars.

I think they will need to make a statement like this to lure in new EV buyers as well as keep early adopters in the brand.

here's another idea... Maybe they keep the existing warranty at 9 bars 60,000 miles, but wrap the "expanded" warranty into their extended warranty on the car that they try and sell you. Right now the extended warranties aren't that compelling because the battery capacity isn't included, but if it was? Would you buy the extended warranty? For those of us who understand the reality behind the packs, maybe not, but for 90% of the consumers, it might sell a warranty.

 

[mjblazin]

It is not a warranty if the seller picks up liability that will be 95% likely. That is just an add to purchase price. In that case, Nissan should just sell call options for each year after the catastrophic coverage period on the replacement battery at initial purchase. Nissan would thus offer a hedge for an event both sides know will occur. The only question is whether the buyer will there at the event. Otherwise you essentially prepay for battery that you may not use.

 

[evnow]

It is not a warranty if the seller picks up liability that will be 95% likely.

There is no reason why people who lease and those in milder climates should pay for 5% of people who buy Leafs in hot weather. I like the idea of Nissan offer extended warranty for an additional price - which only hot weather buyers may choose to pay.

Invariably stronger warranty will lead to higher prices.

 

[TomT]

And these days, where Hyundai/Kia reliability has risen and Toyota reliability has fallen, Hyundau/Kia still keeps the longer warranty because it is a great sales and marketing tool.

That's true, but Hyundai/Kia offers the longer warranty because Hyundai/Kia was seen as not very reliable by many, so they said, "Fine, we'll offer a warranty to offer the piece of mind that our brand name doesn't."

 

[TomT]

But then, Toyota is historically a fairly arrogant company...

BTW, just because a manufacturer knows their products well and is highly reliant doesn't mean they'll offer better warranty. Toyota doesn't offer better warranty than Kia, for eg.

 

[tkdbrusco]

Not sure if you guys saw today, but Toyota/Mazda just announced a partnership to share technology and incorporate into both brands vehicles.

 

[ishiyakazuo]

And these days, where Hyundai/Kia reliability has risen and Toyota reliability has fallen, Hyundau/Kia still keeps the longer warranty because it is a great sales and marketing tool.

That's true, but Hyundai/Kia offers the longer warranty because Hyundai/Kia was seen as not very reliable by many, so they said, "Fine, we'll offer a warranty to offer the piece of mind that our brand name doesn't."

Yup! That's why I got my '06 Sonata. Even back then, there were a number of reports saying that it was comparable in safety and quality to Camry and Accord, so I rolled the dice, picking it up for thousands less. I had some issues but they were all covered under warranty except for one or two small things.

 

[GRA]

If sales of one or more of the better-warrantied competitors take(s) off and their own lag (and that's a major part of the reason, or they think it is), what choice will they have? They can try dropping the price, but if people place a higher value on long-term security than initial price, they'll have to compete either by offering an extended capacity warranty as an extra-cost option, or including it on all cars.

Or they could have another try at the model where you buy the car and lease the battery which, like a true capacity warranty, assigns the risk of quickly degrading batteries to Nissan.

Some cars like Volt historically have shown very low battery degradation, whether due to superior chemistry, superior electrolyte construction, superior BMS software, active cooling, reservation of more spare capacity, or some combination of those factors. These cars I would trust without a true (pro-rata) battery warranty.

For a car like Leaf with history of rapid degradation in most climates, if Nissan refuses to offer a true warranty I must assume that's because they have analyzed their wealth of test and real-world use data, and determined there is unacceptably high risk of rapid degradation and so they will not assume that financial risk. In that case, neither will I.

If Consumer Reports analyzes reader data on 3-4 years experience with 2015+ model year cars, and that shows that those batteries are reliable, then I will trust Nissan again with or without a true warranty. However if that happens it will mean that Nissan was overly conservative. With their superior mass of data they could have known 3-4 years earlier that they would have faced negligible financial risk from offering a true warranty, and as a result could have had higher vehicle sales in the interim.

I'm a fan of battery leasing for the reason you state, among others. It means that you have a guaranteed capacity without worries, and IMO is the only way to make battery swapping viable (given a large enough fleet, which will require multiple companies to agree to use standard packs for consumer use, and will probably take decades to accomplish. More likely is a company fleet). After all, if you're only buying a given capacity, you don't care whether or not you get 'your' battery back; from the customer perspective they're all the same (I assume the battery lessor would hide any capacity over the nominal value, much as GM seems to have done with the Volt). Swap done, you get a readout of usable kWh, and it's either X or "give me another". Since the companies won't want to waste time doing multiple swaps, they'll do this check before installation.

One of the happy benefits for the customer of battery-swapping is that it gives the battery provider an incentive to make upgrades, and to make them backward-compatible. "Do you want to keep leasing a battery with X capacity, or would you prefer our new X+15 kWh battery for only Y dollars more/month?" Of course, if we ever get to the point that batteries have enough capacity, charge rate and life-time longevity that they can completely replace ICEs, battery swapping will no longer be viable.

I think the long-term existential problem for most car companies now is deciding whether they're going to remain classic car companies, or instead become mobility-provider companies.

 

[Bazooka]

I'm a fan of battery leasing for the reason you state, among others. It means that you have a guaranteed capacity without worries, and IMO is the only way to make battery swapping viable (given a large enough fleet, which will require multiple companies to agree to use standard packs for consumer use, and will probably take decades to accomplish. More likely is a company fleet). After all, if you're only buying a given capacity, you don't care whether or not you get 'your' battery back; from the customer perspective they're all the same (I assume the battery lessor would hide any capacity over the nominal value, much as GM seems to have done with the Volt). Swap done, you get a readout of usable kWh, and it's either X or "give me another". Since the companies won't want to waste time doing multiple swaps, they'll do this check before installation.

One of the happy benefits for the customer of battery-swapping is that it gives the battery provider an incentive to make upgrades, and to make them backward-compatible. "Do you want to keep leasing a battery with X capacity, or would you prefer our new X+15 kWh battery for only Y dollars more/month?" Of course, if we ever get to the point that batteries have enough capacity, charge rate and life-time longevity that they can completely replace ICEs, battery swapping will no longer be viable.

I think the long-term existential problem for most car companies now is deciding whether they're going to remain classic car companies, or instead become mobility-provider companies.

Strongly agree, particularly with your second paragraph (the part about incentivizing car makers to do the right things). And your last sentence is the fundamental question all car companies are facing in ways they've never seen before. EVs are not just disruptive in terms of what kind of products car companies can provide to customers, or even how those changed products alter the infrastructure (more chargers, fewer gas stations and muffler shops, etc.), but the basic nature of what it means to be a "car company".

This is why I think we're entering a profoundly interesting period regarding how the leading EV companies, most notably Nissan, handle the transition to the next stage of EV development. Nissan's bump in pack size to 30 kWh this Fall is welcome, as is what I predict will be a respectable price cut, but they're still baby steps along the right path. The details of the Leaf II are where we'll really find out how Nissan sees itself, the whole car biz, and the public's demand for personal transportation evolving. What battery packs will they offer across or even within trim levels? At what price and warranty? Will they surprise us and embrace pack swapping or leasing?

As much as I would love to hear the conversations within various companies re:EVs, I would most definitely not want to be part of them, as I would push hard for the kind of things people in this forum want, and I would be shouted down day after day, I'm guessing.

Prediction: When the Leaf II arrives, Nissan will continue the practice introduced this Fall of the S having one pack size and the SV/SL having a bigger pack. But the S will get the 30 kWh and the SV/SL will get Something Bigger. The 24 pack will go out of production, even as a replacement part, so people with older Leafs will use a 30 as a replacement/upgrade part. (This lets Nissan grow the pack sizes and options with a minimal number of new packs developed, distributed, supported, etc.) As for the Infiniti LE, I have no clue.

 

[GRA]

LEAFs coming off lease are becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of cars. Or perhaps Henny Youngman would be an appropriate spokesman - Take my car - please!

Via ievs:

BREAKING: Nissan Announces Up To $7,000 Credit For Buying Your Leased LEAF

http://insideevs.com/nissan-announces-up-to-7000-credit-for-buying-your-leased-leaf/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Is that the smell of desperation?

 

[Bazooka]

LEAFs coming off lease are becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of cars. Or perhaps Henny Youngman would be an appropriate spokesman - Take my car - please!

Via ievs:

BREAKING: Nissan Announces Up To $7,000 Credit For Buying Your Leased LEAF

http://insideevs.com/nissan-announces-up-to-7000-credit-for-buying-your-leased-leaf/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Is that the smell of desperation?

None of this should be a surprise to anyone, and I mean anyone. We all saw this coming a long time ago; it was always painfully obvious that the demand for longer range and dropping battery prices would force car makers to maker bigger-than-they-would-have-preferred increases in range. And that step-function increase in range meant that stepping over the transition from iteration N to N+1 of a given model was always going to be problematic, to say the least.

I would bet anything that this was the plan all along in Nissan: Once a lot of Leafs are coming off lease in the shadow of range increases (and the Leaf II casts a very long shadow), throttle up incentives as needed, likely with a pretty high ceiling ($10k?), to avoid a meltdown of the resale market and a tidal wave of bad PR that hurts new car leases and sales.

I give Nissan credit for having the guts to walk into this situation with a plan that will probably allow them to exit in good shape.

 

[GRA]

LEAFs coming off lease are becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of cars. Or perhaps Henny Youngman would be an appropriate spokesman - Take my car - please!

Via ievs:

BREAKING: Nissan Announces Up To $7,000 Credit For Buying Your Leased LEAF

http://insideevs.com/nissan-announces-up-to-7000-credit-for-buying-your-leased-leaf/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Is that the smell of desperation?

None of this should be a surprise to anyone, and I mean anyone. We all saw this coming a long time ago; it was always painfully obvious that the demand for longer range and dropping battery prices would force car makers to maker bigger-than-they-would-have-preferred increases in range. And that step-function increase in range meant that stepping over the transition from iteration N to N+1 of a given model was always going to be problematic, to say the least.

I would bet anything that this was the plan all along in Nissan: Once a lot of Leafs are coming off lease in the shadow of range increases (and the Leaf II casts a very long shadow), throttle up incentives as needed, likely with a pretty high ceiling ($10k?), to avoid a meltdown of the resale market and a tidal wave of bad PR that hurts new car leases and sales.

I give Nissan credit for having the guts to walk into this situation with a plan that will probably allow them to exit in good shape.

I think you're giving Nissan credit for way too much forethought, given how they flailed around trying one ad hoc solution after another re battery degradation. I don't believe that they expected the batteries to degrade as fast as they did; certainly, that accords with repeated comments by high corporate officials. It's mildly ironic that a lot of the earliest adopters bought their LEAFs because they were afraid that if they leased them Nissan would pull an EV-1, take their much-loved cars out of their hands and crush them. Instead, we have a situation where Nissan is going to have to crush many leased LEAFs, just because very few people want a car which was limited in capability even when new, and with a degraded battery is even more limited. Hence, Nissan is trying to salvage whatever money they can out of the cars, because whatever they sell them for it's still better than taking them back en masse now and crushing them.

My local dealer has four used ones on the lot, 1 @ $12k on the windshield and the other 3 @ $13k. There's a used dealer a little further down auto row with a similar total and similar prices. And the Nissan dealer's storage lot has, by my estimate, 40-50 LEAFs sitting in it. You can either attribute that to current heavy demand, or else past demand and current over-allocation. Since the lot only holds 60-70 cars, I suspect it's the latter.

 

[TonyWilliams]

I would bet anything that this was the plan all along in Nissan...
I give Nissan credit for having the guts to walk into this situation with a plan that will probably allow them to exit in good shape.

Please thumb through this and tell me about their "planning":

http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=220120#p220120" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[desiv]

Instead, we have a situation where Nissan is going to have to crush many leased LEAFs, just because very few people want a car which was limited in capability even when new, and with a degraded battery is even more limited..

I think that might be a bit of a stretch..
I think Nissan is going to eventually sell these lease returns, just not at the prices they would like.
Yes, the value will be significantly lower, but I can see lots of use cases for people wanting a used car that won't need gas or oil changes, even if it only goes 30 miles or so..
Kids first car, really basic commuter, etc..
I do expect there to be a continued drop in value as the higher range cars show up, but I don't expect it to go so low that crushing is the only option.

As a teen growing up, I would have MUCH preferred a nicer 30 mile car to my Ford Pinto...

desiv

 

[Bazooka]

Instead, we have a situation where Nissan is going to have to crush many leased LEAFs, just because very few people want a car which was limited in capability even when new, and with a degraded battery is even more limited..

I think that might be a bit of a stretch..
I think Nissan is going to eventually sell these lease returns, just not at the prices they would like.
Yes, the value will be significantly lower, but I can see lots of use cases for people wanting a used car that won't need gas or oil changes, even if it only goes 30 miles or so..
Kids first car, really basic commuter, etc..
I do expect there to be a continued drop in value as the higher range cars show up, but I don't expect it to go so low that crushing is the only option.

As a teen growing up, I would have MUCH preferred a nicer 30 mile car to my Ford Pinto...

desiv

I think the biggest advantage Nissan has is that the absolute number of Leafs coming off lease isn't enormous. We're not talking about a couple of million cars, but in the tens of thousands. So they'll offer deals to get some people to buy their car instead of returning it, and they'll sell the rest, possibly after upgrading them with a 30kWh pack.

But as I keep pointing out, the biggest hurdle to more widespread adoption of EVs in the US is market psychology. Far too many people -- and I run into them all the time -- still think that EVs are some weird niche product, glorified golf carts that can't function "like a real car". Once people get over that and similar misperceptions, it will likely be easier to move a lot of the used Leafs as second, third, etc. cars.

 

[EVDRIVER]

Instead, we have a situation where Nissan is going to have to crush many leased LEAFs, just because very few people want a car which was limited in capability even when new, and with a degraded battery is even more limited..

I think that might be a bit of a stretch..
I think Nissan is going to eventually sell these lease returns, just not at the prices they would like.
Yes, the value will be significantly lower, but I can see lots of use cases for people wanting a used car that won't need gas or oil changes, even if it only goes 30 miles or so..
Kids first car, really basic commuter, etc..
I do expect there to be a continued drop in value as the higher range cars show up, but I don't expect it to go so low that crushing is the only option.

As a teen growing up, I would have MUCH preferred a nicer 30 mile car to my Ford Pinto...

desiv

Thousands and thousands of lease returns are bought at auction and sent to Norway and other countries. Few dealers buy them and most cars go overseas. No problem moving them unless the exchange rate is not good.

 

[knightmb]

Thousands and thousands of lease returns are bought at auction and sent to Norway and other countries. Few dealers buy them and most cars go overseas. No problem moving them unless the exchange rate is not good.

Good point, it's not like the vehicles need to be modified to charge up the battery. Provided the steering wheel is on the correct side for the country it goes to (probably another modification maybe?), the vehicles can get a second life. We often forget here in the US that not everyone in the world needs 75-100 miles of range to use it when other countries have cities and people more centrally located. The US is probably the only place you find people that want to live 60+ miles in the middle of nowhere. :lol: