massive failure of traction motor, traction motor inverter, vcm and ipdm

a few months ago my 2012 leaf shut itself down while i was driving down a major road traveling at 50km/hr. I was able to push the car out of traffic and had it towed to dealership. It took them approximately 3 weeks to figure out what was wrong with technical support from nissan canada. the traction motor inverter was damaged and possibly more. retail price of inverter was $6000. I bought one used for $1000 it was installed and unfortunately there was more bad news, the vcm($3000) and IPDM(super cheap $600) were also damaged. After a major screw up by the dealership had me looking for a part number that didn't exist these 2 parts were also replaced. Total cost $2000 for parts and $2600 for labour. Dealership took it for a test ride and after 20 minutes it shut itself off. They now tell me the traction motor is no good and replacement cost is $9000. I contacted nissan canada and they refuse to assist me in any way. The car was 5 months out of warranty. This appears to be a relatively rare occurence based on what people report in the forum but I would appreciate any suggestions. I could replace the motor with a used one but that would cost atleast another $2000. the car has only 37000km on it. The battery pack when tested a year ago was good and I still had 12 bars, though I would lose a bar within the first 5km of driving typically.

What is the IPDM?

I bought my 2011 and had it shipped 1,000 miles for less than $7,000.
Might be time for another car, nissan leafs are even cheaper if you get one with a ruined battery and reuse the battery from your current car since it sounds like it's pretty strong.
You could part out the rest of your old car for a few. Thousand. Even a degraded leaf battery is worth money.

Dealerships are terrible at diagnosing problems, especially in cars with which they aren't thoroughly familiar. My educated guess is that the part(s) that actually needed to be replaced are a fairly small subset of the ones that actually got replaced...

LeftieBiker said:

Dealerships are terrible at diagnosing problems, especially in cars with which they aren't thoroughly familiar. My educated guess is that the part(s) that actually needed to be replaced are a fairly small subset of the ones that actually got replaced...

Click to expand...

Unfortunately so true, given the lack of competence at most all ICEV OEM dealers when it comes to an EV. Even diagnosing an electronic
ICEV problem, it's typically a hit-or-miss generally resulting in a costly ($1K+) unneeded electronic module. That's why having a diagnostic
tool such as LeafSpy is so valuable. Without such tool as LeafSpy, one is at the "mercy" of the OEM. It's very unlikely that the OP's real
problem was nearly as extensive, i.e. three modules, as diagnosed. Could have been as simple as a loose wire or a corroded electrical
connection. Luckily, the Leaf is extremely reliable and issues such as this rarely occur!

thanks for the ideas! As I wrote the post I was thinking the dealership hasn't even really told me what is wrong with the traction motor. I will investigate further with LeafSpy. The dealership actually had nissan canada do some of the diagnostics remotely. I naively assumed that the diagnostics they used were reliable perhaps. They must be super mad I havent bought any replacement parts from Nissan itself.

I forgot to add IPDM - intelligent power distribution module