Worried about buying this Leaf

[Dib Dibs]

Hi

This is my first post here so please forgive me when I come accross as naive

My wife was looking to buy a new car and found a 2016 nissan leaf 30kW with about 130,000 on the clock and 9 bars of life on the battery, for £2000.

I went to check it out for any problems that were immediately obvious to me as someone who has always driven regular petrol cars. I wanted to take it onto the dual carriageway just to check it felt right getting up to a decent speed. The whole trip was about 7 minutes long and we drove maybe 2km at 70mph, the rest was under 30mph. The ambient temperature was about 0 degrees.

The state of charge (a battery and petrol pump style symbol in the centre of the dashboard) dropped from 75% to 58% in that time. He put it into B mode about a minute or two before we got back to his house and the charge went back up from 48% to 58% which I don't really understand, maybe someone could explain where to 10% came from? He turned the car off before I could really understand what everything on the dashboard meant.

I was only really concerned about normal car issues before I bought it, but the way the battery depleted had me worried. The guy said it ran down so fast because I was driving it wrong (inefficiently), which could well be the case, I really don't know

If this is anywhere near normal for a car of this age and mileage and if any leaf battery can be depleted this fast with the wrong kind of driving style then I will go ahead and buy it and initiate our EV transition.

Any direction on this would be useful. Thank you in advance.

 

[cornbinder89]

Too much fluctuation in the battery suggests weak cells. I would avoid.

 

[Dib Dibs]

Too much fluctuation in the battery suggests weak cells. I would avoid.

Thankyou. Having read up on the subject it definately sounds like this one has that problem.

 

[Wrench7747]

the charge went back up from 48% to 58% which I don't really understand, maybe someone could explain where to 10% came from?

If the State of Charge went up after slowing the car down, that is absolutely a sign of a bad battery. That is from bad cells that ran down much farther than all of the other cells because of too much internal resistance, then recovered some of their voltage slowly. (It's kind of like the bad cell is a swimming pool of thick mud instead of water; heavy load pulled the electrons out of half of the cell, and then unused electrons slowly trudged their way over from the other side of the cell to replace them)

You should only buy this car if it is inexpensive enough that you are already planning to replace the battery, and have already found a shop with a replacement battery at a good price. I'm in the US so prices are different, but I think £2000 is still twice as much as it's worth.

The guy said it ran down so fast because I was driving it wrong (inefficiently)

No. It is true that high speed driving is the most inefficient. However, 2 km at 70mph still should have only dropped the battery 2 or 3%

If this is anywhere near normal for a car of this age and mileage

The 30kwh packs in the leaf have a history of the most trouble. So this failure mode is well known for them. But no, it is still not normal EV behavior and should not be considered acceptable.

Do some searching around here about LeafSpy app and OBD2 dongle. Nobody should but a used leaf without that.

 

[sailordude]

dont buy it

 

[DavidMW]

It is possible for the SOC to increase a % or two when slowing down, if you're using regenerative braking. This has happened on several occasions when going downhill.