new 2019 E+ leaf battery pack no active cooling?

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garsh said:
For some reason, people like you seem to think that the batteries are only going bad in places like Arizona. That's not true. They're going bad sooner in Arizona. It happens much more quickly in a hot climate. But the batteries are losing capacity no matter the climate. It just takes longer in a mild climate. But here I am, sitting at 100k miles on my Leaf, and I can no longer use it as a daily driver. I now have a commuter car that can no longer drive far enough (at least in the winter) to make a one-way journey to work.

When I joined this forum in May 2012, I was far more pessimistic than the group. The LEAF was the Wondercar! I was a fuddy duddy.

It was amazing how, in just a few months, I was changed from the Marvin of the group to the Pollyanna. Without any noticeable change in my views.

Batteries lose capacity. Both due to time and cycles. Faster in hot places. Different for different chemistries. And it is complex. Unless you are a real battery geek, the information you can trust is the battery replacement warranty. Expect that the battery will last the length of the capacity replacement warranty for most people. A few people in hot places will win the battery warranty sweepstakes, and get a replacement. (and have close to twice the time and miles!) People in cool places can expect to do better. As you have.

The 2012 LEAF came with no battery replacement warranty. Red flag warning for me. I didn't buy until Arizona's LEAFs had been around for more than a year. I figured that if a LEAF could last a year in real heat without serious problems, in the cool NW I would get 3 to 4 times till serious loss, and as my commute was short AND I was likely to have charging at work, I might get 8 years/80k miles. Just maybe 10, my usual time to own a car. I worked out that the LEAF had a "No Worries Range" of about 30 miles. Which was about my round trip commute. In 2012 this was raging pessimism. With a 60 mile commute, you clearly were far more optimistic.

And now you are not.

Have you worked out your cost per mile? Would you share it?

garsh said:
But if you want to buy the car and plan on holding onto it for 10 years (like I did), you're going to be very disappointed.

If you start with unreasonably good expectations, you will likely be very disappointed. If you start with unreasonably bad expectations, you will likely be delighted. If you start with realistic expectations, you likely will be satisfied.

So can we try to set reasonable expectatons? The battery will last the warranty (with footnotes on hot and cool places). 8 years/100k miles should give a reasonable cost per mile if you buy the car. There are reasons to lease (tax credit, promotions were you can lease a car for less than buying, etc)

Do you take issue with that?
 
LeftieBiker said:
Why do we have 'these debates over and over again'? Because folks like WetEV keep misleading new people, in the apparent hope that they will buy a New Leaf without worrying about the battery - as long as they don't live in Arizona or maybe Florida or New Mexico. Anyplace else is apparently fine, now that Nissan has fixed the battery issues. :|


Batteries degrade with time and miles.

How am I misleading people by suggesting that the battery is likely to last as least as long as the warranty?

With a footnote that you might get a replacement, and almost twice as long of usable battery if you live in a just hot enough place?
And another footnote that in a not quite hot enough place, the battery might last a day longer than the warranty?
And yet another footnote that you might do rather better in cool places?


Do explain.
 
I bought in the spring of 13 and I am really glad I found this site first. I learned a lot before we leased, I had never leased and never considered leasing, but we did and then bought the car off the lease. To me if you know what you are getting in to and what might happen, then you can make an appropriate decision.

FYI this is not including insurance, but fuel / energy and maintenance and repairs, tires, basically everything except insurance we have

2003 VW jetta wagon diesel 23.2 cents / mile, 195,000 miles
2013 Leaf S 23.7 cent / mile, 80,000 miles (lost 1st bar at 72,000)
2016 Honda Odyssey van (bought a year ago) $4.79 / mile 35,000 miles

So I can't complain
 
I said this back in 2012:

The true lifetime of batteries in real cars in real environments with real drivers can't be know for sure until the experiment is run. Nissan, as far as I can see, is trying for success, however there are always factors outside our control. Some may not get the battery life they want...
 
Batteries degrade with time and miles.

How am I misleading people by suggesting that the battery is likely to last as least as long as the warranty?

With a footnote that you might get a replacement, and almost twice as long of usable battery if you live in a just hot enough place?
And another footnote that in a not quite hot enough place, the battery might last a day longer than the warranty?
And yet another footnote that you might do rather better in cool places?


Do explain.

So you are careful to to give these caveats when you encourage people to buy a Leaf? Let's look back just a few pages in this very topic...

garsh wrote:
If you like the car, lease it. Don't purchase. You'll regret purchasing one of these.

WetEV wrote:

I haven't regretting purchasing my Leaf. So have a lot of other people, and not just in the PNW.

Why don't you go sell Tesla someplace that cares?
 
LeftieBiker said:
I haven't seen any such claims. I think you are confusing a BMS software patch that Nissan has issued for the 30kwh packs with an actual BMS reset. I have seen no evidence that a simple BMS reset causes any actual gain in SOH beyond the re-learning period.
You did not, because of you need to know other languages. It is on youtube, but giving link is useless. So in two words, those folks import EV in Eastern Europe. The guy who specializes in Leafs said that in majority cases BMS reset leads to permanent gains in capacity. They being doing this for years, so when Nissan came up with their "fix" for 30kWh battery - it only re-enforced those people claims. Nissan is implicitly degrades some fraction of battery capacity in software every time you cycle battery, use particular level charger and etc. Those small adjustments add up over time, they could be right on the money, or way off from real battery capacity. If they screw up too much like in 30kWh battery case they issued fix. In any case, this procedure is very inexpensive compared to replacing battery (low $$$ vs high $$$$). It wont give you un-existing capacity, but it will get rid of any inaccuracy in Nissan software. Again, they claim it works and in most cases you get the permanent capacity gains. Not to 100% capacity, but considerable gain. Then again this algorithm start chipping off capacity, but it will take quite some time to make material effect, just like in the first place. This procedure is the same some shoddy sellers use to fake full battery to unaware buyer, so then it drop capacity bars and GOM estimates to real capacity in a few weeks.

"To reset the degradation bars the LBC,VCM and meter need to be reset or replaced. If all three are not done the degradation meter will not reset." - it is done with Consult III tool used by Nissan technicians and other folks.

BTW, you can use term "dude" when referring to girls, it just used for boys usually. But using He and She is not interchangeable indeed. I never cared about who is the driver in this article: girl or boy, just assumed it would be boy.
 
So in two words, those folks import EV in Eastern Europe. The guy who specializes in Leafs said that in majority cases BMS reset leads to permanent gains in capacity. They being doing this for years, so when Nissan came up with their "fix" for 30kWh battery - it only re-enforced those people claims. Nissan is implicitly degrades some fraction of battery capacity in software every time you cycle battery, use particular level charger and etc. Those small adjustments add up over time, they could be right on the money, or way off from real battery capacity. If they screw up too much like in 30kWh battery case they issued fix. In any case, this procedure is very inexpensive compared to replacing battery (low $$$ vs high $$$$). It wont give you un-existing capacity, but it will get rid of any inaccuracy in Nissan software. Again, they claim it works and in most cases you get the permanent capacity gains. Not to 100% capacity, but considerable gain. Then again this algorithm start chipping off capacity, but it will take quite some time to make material effect, just like in the first place. This procedure is the same some shoddy sellers use to fake full battery to unaware buyer, so then it drop capacity bars and GOM estimates to real capacity in a few weeks.

Now I'm really puzzled. You seem to understand that a BMS reset by a reseller is a scam to get a false display of 12 capacity bars, but you also say that it's a "50/50" chance that doing so will actually regain some lost capacity, and suggest that someone pay a dealer $100 to do a reset!* No. It appears that there is a bug in the OEM software in the 30kwh pack BMS ONLY. Doing a reset on any other pack won't do anything but give a false display of factory-new capacity until the BMS relearns the true state of the pack. Please don't suggest that people do BMS resets to regain capacity - especially on non-30kwh packs.

* Here is where you wrote the above:

Some folks make claims: if you reset BMS you may get pretty good chunk of capacity back as some of degradation simply added implicitly by computer as projected loss of capacity. Pretty much 50/50 chance of getting some capacity back. I would ask dealership to reset BMS. They should do it for ~$100, but I think it is worse a try in your situation. It is easy to verify as your capacity bars will reset to 12 and then later BMS will learn real capacity of the battery and adjust it accordingly, so projected loss part will be thrown away.
 
LeftieBiker said:
I stand by what I heard and saw. I would do it to my car when it would be needed. Shame on who does it to sell car with bad battery. Praise to Leaf owners who is trying to recover unusable Leaf to the battery real capacity. Nissan does it in listed earlier circumstances (when replacing any of the listed parts) for the same reason - to force battery recalibration to reflect new state correctly. This is not a rocket science, really. What is your credential vs. folks who refurbishing/repurposing Leaf batteries every day? This is not DYI people, they do it on industrial level.

Regarding bugs, Tesla 10 years later is still fixing bugs in their software, there is more bugs and wrong assumptions than you might think in any car, lol
 
What is your credential vs. folks who refurbishing Leaf batteries every day?

I'm not selling anything, and I've been following these issues for close to six years. Do what you like with your own car, but if you give bad advice to others here you will get called on it. No LOL.
 
LeftieBiker said:
,but if you give bad advice to others here you will get called on it. No LOL.
I suggested it to the owner who has Leaf that is not being abused with heat and well taken care of. Who knows, may be he has a habit or need to plug/unplug his car more than a few times a day, this may accelerate estimated capacity loss by the BMS software as it may not take in to account the duration, charge levels and just increments plug/unplug counter and multiply it by fixed weighted coefficient to calculate loss delta for this event. It is difficult to reflect real capacity of the battery in very low control of highly variable charge/discharge cycles or myriads other factors in real life. So they try to simplify and try to predict what effect particular event has. This is where they screw up, sometimes a little, sometimes big and potentially leading to collateral damage to Nissan. As in 30kWh case, thousands of owners would line up to file for warranty replacement with early degradation claims. This "fix" also proves that Nissan BMS never re-adjust or re-learn real battery capacity on its own. Nissan simply fixed the aging algorithm to reflect battery state more realistically and force it to relearn true capacity. So many 30kWh owners got some real capacity back from this "lying" BMS. They care less for folks who is out of warranty, in fact overcharging for battery replacement is very lucrative for them.
 
I suggested it to the owner who has Leaf that is not being abused with heat and well taken care of. Who knows, may be he has a habit to plug/unplug his car more than a few times a day, this may accelerate estimated capacity loss by the BMS software as it may not take in to account the duration, charge levels and just increments plug/unplug counter and multiply it by fixed weighted coefficient to calculate loss delta for this event.

You suggested that the owner of a degraded 2012 Leaf pay a dealer $100 to reset his BMS. Fortunately he knows that his car has a pack with a chemistry that degrades rapidly, and very rapidly in heat. You apparently don't know about the 2011-2012 Leaf problems because you live in a somewhat cooler climate. Do some reading here, please, and familiarize yourself with American Leafs, before offering advice like that.
 
LeftieBiker said:
It is better than you implying he needs to junk his car. Do not forget it is just a suggestion, nobody get paid here to provide service, or file law suite for not delivering services paid for. It is a user forum, where we share opinions and info. You do not like somebody' suggestion, no problem, just move on to something you like.
 
Leaf15 said:
LeftieBiker said:
It is better than you implying he needs to junk his car. Do not forget it is just a suggestion, nobody get paid here to provide service, or file law suite for not delivering services paid for. It is a user forum, where we share opinions and info.

I didn't imply or say any such thing. Please read more carefully.
 
LeftieBiker said:
Batteries degrade with time and miles.

How am I misleading people by suggesting that the battery is likely to last as least as long as the warranty?

With a footnote that you might get a replacement, and almost twice as long of usable battery if you live in a just hot enough place?
And another footnote that in a not quite hot enough place, the battery might last a day longer than the warranty?
And yet another footnote that you might do rather better in cool places?


Do explain.

So you are careful to to give these caveats when you encourage people to buy a Leaf? Let's look back just a few pages in this very topic...

Oh do keep going. Why is buying a 2019 LEAF a bad deal if you drive the car for 8 years/100k miles. At worst, most will be better, some will be far better.

Total cost out the door say $32k. Tax credit $7500. Assume is worthless at 8 years/100k miles (likely will not be), that's $0.245 per mile. Add some pennies for charging, and a dime for insurance, and a few more pennies for license plates and such.

Most people will do better. Battery replacement at 7 years 11 months 29 days and 99,995 miles would be sweet, eh? Or a cool place where 16 years/200k miles is possible?

Yes, a Civic might be a few pennies per mile less. Maybe. Depending on future price of gasoline.

Do explain. Why is a lease better?
 
One of the reasons I bought my 2018 Leaf is that I thought it had the range to travel at least the maximum 120 miles between Electrify America stations. I have been able to map out CHAdeMO routes on PlugShare from DFW to Orlando, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles. Almost all the charging legs are below 110 miles and most are still less than 90 miles.

With condition my battery is in now I figure I can travel 100 miles before LBW at 75 mph and 130 miles before LBW at 60 mph on a warm day on a level road with no wind. When the battery capacity drops down to 8 bars I should still be able to travel 100 miles at 60 mph and 130 miles at 45 mph. With all the new models coming out with longer range I find myself second guessing my decision to buy the 2018 Leaf.

On my recent trip to Colorado, where I was going to a higher elevation and fighting a head wind, I became seriously concerned about my range even though I slowed way down. It turned out that poor assumptions led to my distress and I made my destinations with miles to spare. But a significant range buffer seemed like it would be a valuable asset.

The reason I bought the 2018 Leaf in the first place even though I knew the longer range version was coming out was because I knew the longer range version would cost more. Even with a degraded battery, I should never have any issues with range on my daily commute. And I shouldn’t have trouble traveling at the posted speed limit on the longest trips also after the battery degrades.

I like my Leaf and I really don’t want to spend the money to replace it with something just because it has more range. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the 2018 Leaf has limitations but is still a very versatile car that should be very usable for a long time. I might be able to talk myself into replacing the Leaf at some point but, at least for the foreseeable future, I think I will hold onto it.
 
WetEV said:
Yes, a Civic might be a few pennies per mile less. Maybe. Depending on future price of gasoline.

Do explain. Why is a lease better?
Lease has 1 basic advantage, it acts as a stop-loss in the event this becomes a bad acquisition. In my case, I was able to toss the key fobs to the dealer and walked away when upside-down at the end of 3 years. Was I happy to do so?... basically no, but was the best economic choice at the time. Was my LEAF a bad car or had a badly degraded battery?... absolutely not, was upside-down due to secondary market factors. Would I get another LEAF?... yes, if the the money makes sense and the general package fits my needs.

Personally, I'm not convinced the 60KWh package is right for my needs or packing a larger battery has any real advantage. I'm the oddball that thinks the 40KWh package is likely more closely fitted to my needs. Basically it's cheaper, several hundred pounds lighter, and likely has enough battery to get the job done given it's unlikely to ever get driven over-the-road or plugged into a DCFC. It's more of a question of if this package will stay together with enough battery for 20-25 KWh's over 7-8 years and 150,000+ miles of use.
 
The problem is that many people seem to get the 2018 Leaf because it finally has enough range for their needs. Not 1/3 more range than they will ever need, to allow for degradation, but 20 or 30 miles more. And those are the people who are going to get burned if they buy the car. Sure it won't be worthless on the market, but it will become worthless to them, because they can't use it for their needs. And the resale value will be, once again, poor. It's more than bad enough that Nissan is selling SV Leafs with no heatpump to people who don't understand what that means (and who certainly aren't being educated by Nissan franchise dealerships). No, even those who do have more than enough range when the car is new may find that in a couple of years that is no longer the case. WetEV keeps saying that that's fine - the car isn't worthless, and if it drops even more range they get a new battery in three or four years. Well, it won't be fine for those who got sold a bill of goods: a car that only keeps its advertised range for about a year. I figure that I can at least try to warn them about the range issues, and to suggest that they lease, so they aren't stuck with a car they can no longer use effectively. That isn't rocket science. A discounted Leaf for $20k isn't that great a deal if you have to drive something else every Winter after two years. The 40kwh Leaf can be a great car - IF your range needs are no more than 100 miles.

Rogersleaf slipped in before me. Yes, exactly. A lease may cost more in payments, but it's a bargain if you aren't stuck with a car you can't use and can't sell except at a huge loss.
 
WetEV said:
...Total cost out the door say $32k. Tax credit $7500. Assume is worthless at 8 years/100k miles (likely will not be), that's $0.245 per mile. Add some pennies for charging, and a dime for insurance, and a few more pennies for license plates and such...Why is a lease better?
A lease may or may not be better, depending on several driver specific variables.

In our case, we leased a 2016 SV for less than $9k for 3yr/36,000 miles after all incentives and tax. So about the same as your cost per mile. However, our Leaf is worth more new the first 3 years than any 3 year increment after, so would consider this a better deal for us. YMMV.
 
When calculating capacity, it would seem the most common is ahr* nominal voltage o4 360 so with new pack capacity of 115 ahr, the capacity comes in at 41.4 kwh which I believe to be correct based on my full charge stats. But the real measurement is the available pack which after a dozen full charges, I was unable to determine specifically what that was. The stats were all over the place including one that read 506 GIDs, 39.3 kwh available and SOC of 99.51%! :shock:

So is it the batteries or simply Nissan management? I am suspecting its the latter.

So now we have a huge variety of experiences from LEAFers that covers the full spectrum from overjoyed to completely pissed off. Some if it consequential (FYI weather issues happen. I know TWO Bolters who are just as pissed off as you are and yeah, they are freezing too) some it is simply something we saw coming months ago that is aggravated by cold (not frigid) weather. What is obvious is that several thing "we" do matter. What is not so clear is what exactly those things are. There are too many instances of people in the same area (same city even) that have HUGELY different experiences. Why is that?

Well, the one obvious thing is the more you drive the LEAF , the better it does. I just saw a 6 bar LEAF with 42,000 miles on it. It was a 2011. On the flip side we have road warriors with double or triple that mileage at 10 bars. So the "myth" that fast charging temporarily boosts battery stats is laughable. You don't temporary anything over 100,000 miles.

So that constant back and forth "should" be happening. We all think we know whats going on but in reality we only really know what "we" did to ourselves. What is frustrating is the real answer is buried somewhere in this forum but good luck finding it.

As for me? It took 4 tries but I finally got a LEAF that is showing greater than normal degradation. How long will it continue? Who knows? I am fairly confident in saying my stats will hold fairly steady over the next 2½ to 2¾ months before the numbers take another dive. But unlike previous LEAF packs, weather doesn't matter and a lot of QCing doesn't raise the numbers ever. Its either the same (about 65% of the time), a drop of .01% (roughly 30% of the time) or a large drop all of a sudden. sooo...

I am putting together another numbers essay on my battery pack with the various concerns I have. Early indications would appear that viable options include purchase in order to qualify for warranty claim; something I would never consider doing unless there was no doubt I would qualify. With 2 years go in the lease, I have a lot of time to evaluate that decision.
 
Well, the one obvious thing is the more you drive the LEAF , the better it does. I just saw a 6 bar LEAF with 42,000 miles on it. It was a 2011. On the flip side we have road warriors with double or triple that mileage at 10 bars. So the "myth" that fast charging temporarily boosts battery stats is laughable. You don't temporary anything over 100,000 miles.

Several comments. I turned my '13 in with only 17k or so miles on her and 12 bars. Five years old. Little driving after year two. Next, why do you put "myth" in quotes and then claim that it's a...myth??? Last, that last sentence makes no sense to me, either.
 
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