Chademo killed my new 2018 Leaf

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Mike04

Member
Joined
Feb 23, 2018
Messages
19
When the charger started there was a bang and smoke from the charger. My car had to be towed to the dealer where it sits today.

I'll give the long version of my story: I pulled up to the chargers, planning on parking my car at the 6kV and going back to my office. I have done this a couple of times in the week and a half I have had my new 2018 Leaf. The 6kV chargers were occupied, but the Chademo was available. I had not used a fast charger, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I scanned my card to release the cable and walked around and plugged it into the car. When I got back to the charger the charger had apparently timed out. So I scanned my card again.

After scanning my card there was a bang, then some smoke came from the charger and an error screen came up.

I went to the front of the car to disconnect, but the red light was still on the handle and it was locked to my car. I called the number on the machine, which got me to the Greenlots assistance line.

After Greenlots tried unsucessfully to release the cable remotely, someone came out and shut off the main power to the machine. This released the handle. But now my car just had a Warning No EV Power screen and would not start.

Nissan Assistance towed me to the dealer where the car sits now.

The tech at the dealer tells me that there are pages of error codes and he is waiting for instructions from Nissan.

:cry:

This story seems a lot like mine:

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/motors/esb-and-nissan-investigate-cause-of-fault-at-fast-charging-point-1.2620721
 
Mike04 said:
I'll give the long version of my story: I pulled up to the chargers, planning on parking my car at the 6kV and going back to my office. I have done this a couple of times in the week and a half I have had my new 2018 Leaf. The 6kV chargers were occupied, but the Chademo was available. I had not used a fast charger, so I thought I'd give it a go.
Not that you used these, but 6 kV? 6000 volts? That would surely kill a Leaf.
 
Aren't there supposed to be all kinds of safety protocols that prevent this from happening?
 
Reminds me of the fun we had around here when GE Wattstations were breaking LEAF chargers. They kept pointing fingers at each other for quite a while...then Nissan suddenly had a firmware update to fix the problem.
 
I'll be pleasantly surprised if the blame games do not begin shortly and OP is told to pay the repair bills.
 
LeftieBiker said:
Was the car still On when you tried to start charging?
sh

I believe it was not on. Certainly not intentionally. But it shouldn't matter. These things need to be idiot proof if they are going to be a mainstream mode of transportation. Anyone could forget to push the stop button.
 
OK Nissan, you've convinced me. I'll drive a Leaf tomorrow, but I'm not leasing one anytime soon. You'd think they'd retooled the whole car, instead of the nose, tail and battery pack...
 
LeftieBiker said:
OK Nissan, you've convinced me. I'll drive a Leaf tomorrow, but I'm not leasing one anytime soon. You'd think they'd retooled the whole car, instead of the nose, tail and battery pack...
or jumped the gun putting in some of the new chademo parameters skipping the backwards compatibility step...
 
Mike04 said:
Sorry 6kW not 6kV. Would 6kV at 1 amp kill the Leaf? That would still be 6kW.
Only once the battery was charged and the contactors opened. 6,000V would likely jump the contactors and keep charging the battery. But with the battery connected and being charged it is impossible to have 6,000V and 1A at the same time.

Volts are like pressure and amps like flow. If the tank (battery) has 400psi (volts) and is being pumped up with 1cc/m (amps) it's not going to jump to 6,000psi any time soon until the valves close (contactors) and the compressor pumps up to 6,000psi and blows apart the valves (jumps the contactors).
 
Mike04 said:
Sorry 6kW not 6kV. Would 6kV at 1 amp kill the Leaf?
Probably. J1772 inlet is supposed to have 240 volt input max. CHAdeMO input is about 400 volts.

Leaf battery pack operates around the mid to high 300 volt range.
Mike04 said:
LeftieBiker said:
Was the car still On when you tried to start charging?
sh

I believe it was not on. Certainly not intentionally. But it shouldn't matter. These things need to be idiot proof if they are going to be a mainstream mode of transportation. Anyone could forget to push the stop button.
I agree. It shouldn't matter whether the car was on or not.

Prior to model year '18, if you tried CHAdeMO charging with the car turned on first, it simply wouldn't work. It was easy to do that on the '11 and '12 due to the mechanical charging door release w/no interlock. On the '13 to '17, since you have to push a button, the opener button does nothing when the car's in READY mode. It must be turned off to release.

OP, willing to post a Plugshare link to the CHAdeMO charger you used? It'd be interesting to know the model and whether anyone else had trouble w/that unit.
 
ChAdeMO released version 1.1 of their specification in September 2015. I will assume that the 2018 Nissan LEAF conforms to this new standard. It seems inconceivable, but is it possible that chargers designed and certified to the 0.9 version of the standard could damage vehicles which are designed and certified for version 1.1? In other words, could 1.1 be incompatible with the older specifications?

That's really hard to imagine, and it is even harder to imagine that Nissan would not have tested their new cars with all of the popular CHAdeMO chargers out there, but clearly something is amiss here.

So far, this appears to be a major fail on Nissan's part.
 
No, it is backwards compatible...

RegGuheert said:
It seems inconceivable, but is it possible that chargers designed and certified to the 0.9 version of the standard could damage vehicles which are designed and certified for version 1.1? In other words, could 1.1 be incompatible with the older specifications?
 
TomT said:
No, it is backwards compatible...
RegGuheert said:
It seems inconceivable, but is it possible that chargers designed and certified to the 0.9 version of the standard could damage vehicles which are designed and certified for version 1.1? In other words, could 1.1 be incompatible with the older specifications?
Sure, per the specifications. I would expect nothing different.

But that doesn't mean that some implementations of the old specification didn't fudge a bit or that some of the implementations were fully compliant but were done in such a way that was never conceived of by the standards committee.
 
Greenlots apparently uses all kinds of hardware as they are primarily a "charge management" company so it would be essential at this point to determine what brand of charger was used.

I can confirm we now have several reports that Aeroenvironment DCFCs will NOT work.

In not so unrelated news. Aeroenvironment received a 2018 LEAF to test yesterday (soooo, "now" is a good time??)
 
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