Firetruck41 said:
I am really confused as to the negative response to my post?
1. Length of capacity warranty: 5years/60k miles
2. Battery cost: To the best of our current knowledge, if you need a new battery it costs ~$6500. Things could change in all kinds of ways in the future, but if you plan to shell out $6500 for a new battery, you won't be disappointed.
3. you only need to "replace the battery when the range is too low for your use". Written exactly that way for a reason. It is variable based on the OP, and his future circumstances. Could be in 4 years, could be in 15 years depending on battery degradation and required use/commute.
Well I didn't see your post as something intended to be negative and I didn't intend for my post to be seen that way either. The OP said "how concerned should I be about have to replace my battery." and I chose to respond to your post instead of his because yours had some solid info but deserved to be fleshed out more, Looking back at it I should have started and/or ended the post differently to show it wasn't an attack on you but just probing questions meant to add to the discussion.
As to how a negative tone might have slipped in, In this highly political world we live in there is a concept called "spin" and another called "FUD". The cost of replacing the battery pack in the leaf has been used as a negative hanging over prospective buyers heads since before the first car came out of the factory.
Any discussion of price of replacing the pack needs to be tempered by a realistic expectation that you might not ever actually replace it.
1. The car might get totaled in an accident before you need to replace the battery pack.
2. The battery pack might not ever degrade enough that you need to replace it.
3. Nissan might replace the pack for free preventing you from needing to pay for a pack.
then has to go down the path of trying to figure out when someone would replace the pack
then has to go down the further path of trying to figure out what the cost would be when that day comes.
The way I see it any discussion of pack replacement prices should be in a pack replacement thread. If I were bringing it up in a thread like this I would put a disclaimer in front of it about how unlikely it'd be that you ever pay the current price and then link to another thread that has all the arguing about the price in it.
I'm not sure there may have been 1 or 2 people in the world that have paid the full retail price of a pack. 99% of the pack replacements have been free. Of the pack replacements that have happened I don't think $6500 is the number I remember but maybe I'm wrong on that. I didn't think it was worth finding those cases and tallying the charges.
I hope you understand I'm replying not to highlight a negative but to give more information about why the situation is more positive than just saying a replacement pack today costs $xxxx.
It's so rare a thing I've been googling to try and find the threads here of the one or two people that have done it and I haven't found it yet. If I had would have put URLs in the first reply that you thought sounded negative and mentioned the price vs your $6500. As is I don't know what they paid.
Think about it like asking how much it would cost to replace a 20MB hard drive in 1984. Back then that was a $4000 hard drive or some insane number. But it might never die (most did, but one might survive until now). If someone needs to replace it today they can buy a $50 ssd that would have GB of space and be infinitely faster. Focusing on what the replacement cost is on the day you buy something ignores the price drops that are coming. It's why people consider it smart not to buy insurance on some electronics like TVs because by the time the warranty expires the replacement is likely to be way cheaper than the original.
Nothing negative about that, just needs to be considered.
