RegGuheert
Well-known member
To be fair to Nissan, they DID tell all of us in our owner's manuals to expect to only have 80% capacity left after five years.surfingslovak said:I don't think that anyone expected to see batteries hitting EOL after 2.5 years in Phoenix, and I recall only one source using a 2-year life target. More importantly, based on Arrhenius law and the showing in Phoenix, one can expect first batteries hitting EOL after four years in SoCal, five years in the Bay Area and six years in Seattle. It would appear that very few will see 20% capacity loss in ten years, which part of the original advertising at market launch.
Frankly, I think we should acknowledge that the FIRST LEAFs hit EOL after only 1.5 years in Phoenix, not 2.5 years. That likely means that your timeline for when we should see first articles at EOL in different climates may need to be accelerated a bit.
That said, let's all recognize that we are talking about the edge of the bell-shaped curve here. I'm wondering what percent of the LEAFs in service in Phoenix reached EOL on their batteries after 2.5 years. Is it 5%, 10%, or more like 25%? I don't know. Let's assume 10% for discussion's sake. That implies about 10% of LEAFs in Seattle will reach battery EOL in Seattle in about six years.
So when can we expect the median LEAF owner to experience EOL in these various locations? While I do not think we yet know the 50th percentile point for Phoenix, yet, we likely have enough data from Phoenix first-bar loss data to start to get an idea of the standard deviation of the data. From that we should be able to estimate when the EOL median should occur for Phoenix. For this discussion, I'm going to guess that it is around 3.5 years. Based on that, we might expect the median EOLs in various locations to look like this:
Phoenix: 3.5 years
SoCal: 5 years
Bay Area: 7 years
Seattle: 9 years
Of course, that implies that about HALF of the LEAFs' batteries will last longer than this amount of time. Some will undoubtedly last much longer.
It seems that most Phoenix battery deaths will be covered by the new warranty and quite a few in SoCal, but very few in cooler climates will be covered since the early units will likely exceed the mileage limitation.