Looking at this turgid discussion and all the related threads on this forum from the wrong end of the telescope, it seems to me that what we're doing is working through the painful psychological process of paradigm shifting.
Meaning: although the Leaf and other BEVs LOOK like any and all other cars representative of the 100+ year-old paradigm of ICE vehicles, they are radically different in ways that those of us who have adopted them celebrate, but also in ways that we have, until now, been in steadfast denial of.
Specifically, we are now struggling to come to terms with the one reality about BEVs that is most difficult to face: not frustrating range limitations, not patience-straining recharge times, but the wrenching reality that the life-source, the beating heart, the precious center of the Leaf's miracle and mystique, its traction battery, is mortal - it DIES!! The fact that it dies slowly, gradually and almost imperceptibly does nothing to lessen our pain or relieve our distress; it only protracts and amplifies our grief.
And what we are doing here in this forum is nothing less than working out our grief for the realization that the Promethean promise of electric vehicles is fatally flawed, critically compromised by the crippled chemistry its vision depends on.
Once we recognize that the poisoned pea under our stack of mattresses is the inevitability of battery mortality, what difference does it make whether our batteries linger 4% less long in the Arizona heat, or 10% longer in Seattle's mists? THEY ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!! THEY ARE ALL GOING TO SUCCUMB, INEVITABLY, TO THE MYRIAD STRESSES OF MERE EXISTENCE, OF AGE, OF SERVICE, OF SUBTLE STRESSES AND MINOR ABUSES, and they start degrading, declining, failing, even before they reach the dealers' lots, even before they board the boats for their journey to our shores from Japan. Even before they leave the factories where they were born.
Despite my melodramatic and literary excesses, I do think this recognition underlies and fuels a great deal of the discussion here. We are confronting, and trying to cope with, a new paradigm for personal transportation, one that at first glance appears so promising, approaching perfection. We knew, intellectually, there was a snake in the garden (capacity loss and eventual death) and we told ourselves we were OK with that, we could live with that, and it was easy to live with that as long as we could maintain the illusion that life would go on just as it always has, and Nissan made it easy to sustain the illusion with five-star battery ratings and "hidden" missing capacity bars. Oh, how we love to live in denial! (There are still one or two out there posting and boasting they have no loss...)
But we could hold off reality only so long, and at last the scales have fallen from our eyes. The stage of denial is over (at least for most of us), and the stage of anger is in full expression, leading to the stage we are now entering: bargaining (both with Nissan and among ourselves). Still to come, according to the Kübler-Ross model: depression, then acceptance.
We've a ways to go yet.
Edit: this post is not intended to trivialize or dismiss the "excessive" capacity loss issue.
It is simply meant to offer a different, and hopefully helpful, perspective on our collective experience.
