Warning: Battery Replacement Cost Increase (now $8500)

[powersurge]

I feel the same way that all of you do about spending tons of money on a new battery. I HATE spending $5,000 per year on car insurance (on all of my cars) that just vanishes when I write the check.....

The other way of looking at it is that the $9,000 new battery will give you another 8-10 years of car use... I would guess that the useful lifetime of a Leaf is much more than 100,000 miles. so the new battery is a FIXED COST.

However Depreciation of a buying a new EV, alone, will be the $9,000 (that you are worried about in a few years..)

Also, If you have an ICE keeping a car over 100,000 miles would incur many VARIABLE COSTS... Which will add up again.

We don't complain that our car is worthless when it runs out of gas.... We complain about the price of gas, and fill the tank, week, after week..... That is the same thing.

[DaveinOlyWA]

Not true. I know someone who just paid to have their pack replaced and it was a 24 kwh pack.

To be clear, everything I wrote is true. Whether the statement by the dealer, which I referenced, is true or not, I cannot say. While I've read enough on these forums to take your statements as reliable, there is enough missing detail from the statement above that I can't say for sure it applies in our situation.

Nevertheless, if we ever do decide to pay such a high price to have our LEAF's battery replaced, rest assured we will get a statement in writing from the dealer about what exactly the replacement will be and what it will cost, before actually proceeding with any work.

The person at the dealership we contacted is, so far, very confident in his own statement. Granted, neither of the nearby Nissan dealers have demonstrated much competence with me. Never mind that at both, the staff seems to turn over yearly, which I think is nuts. I hate our local Chevy dealer, but at least I got to deal with the same crooks each time I'd gone in over the past 20 years, instead of having to break in all new ones each time.

You can only say everything you said was relayed correctly from your source. Every day is new so this could simply be a policy change by Nissan but the thought of 24 kwh packs being old and no longer manufactured is something we need to lose because that is not true. Every cell is batch processed and then a pack is created. There is not a whole lot of hoops needed to create any size pack.

TBT; Even if it was a 30 kwh pack, I can't figure out a decent TCO on your situation due to wildly different experiences regarding degradation. I know people with 120,000 miles on their 2015 24 kwh pack and not even halfway to losing their first bar along with 30 kwh owners who are on the cusp of their 2ND pack replacement under warranty...

Going back to cell manufacturing; it is very much an exacting process that is not much less technical than building CPUs. But even intel has to weed out the bad because their process which is likely the best in the World, still does not yield perfect results.

I think Nissan's failing is they don't know how to evaluate their cells effectively.

[SageBrush]

The other way of looking at it is that the $9,000 new battery will give you another 8-10 years of car use... I would guess that the useful lifetime of a Leaf is much more than 100,000 miles. so the new battery is a FIXED COST.

You are ignoring a lot:

1. The battery is not covered by your insurance.
2. The maintenance costs that come with an older car
3. That $9k buys you a golf cart range car. That was OK in 2011, not today

[peted]

So as you talk about your circumstances, why waste $9000 on another short term battery? Wouldn't it be best than to sell off or trade it in? Get as much value you can now for Leaf, because of fast depreciation, and get a tax credit on the new purchase of Bolt or Model 3? Last I knew, full tax credit may come back for Tesla. It is sad to be in this position because Leaf is such a good car if not for bad batteries.

"Waste" is a prejudiced way to phrase it. Rest assured, we won't buy the battery if we decide the money would be wasted. If we do decide to buy the battery, then by definition we have established that, at least for us, the money isn't wasted.

The car's a 2013, and even if the battery were in really good shape, it looks to me as though the best price we'd get is around $7-8K (optimistically). With a failing battery, I'd guess we're closer to $5K, give or take.

Regardless, I don't get the logic behind your proposal. I can rule out the Bolt just based on its size. I barely fit in the LEAF, and the Bolt's seats are too narrow for reasonable comfort. The Model 3 fits me better, but it's a $50K car, and purchased new we'd lose tens of thousands of that value in the first year or two. And even if it didn't, that's still roughly six times what we're looking at for a battery price (we'd have to buy the Model 3 in the next month or so to get even the $3750 credit, and there's no guarantee even that will remain, never mind would the $7500 credit be restored).

Given that we already have the Model S (which used, cost us at least $15K less than we'd spend on a new Model 3), we don't actually need another large(ish) sedan.

We're certainly not going to be buying a new battery any time soon. But it's just as certain that it's premature to state unequivocally that doing so would be absolutely the wrong choice, or especially that as an alternative we should be looking to spend six times as much on a brand new car, where we'll lose as much value in the first year or two of ownership as two batteries would cost.

[SageBrush]

I think Nissan's failing is they don't know how to evaluate their cells effectively.

How about that. You say something I agree with.

This may be nitpicking but "effectively" is a question of QC tolerance. I think I read that Nissan allows a 20 - 30 mV range in cells*. That amount of variation has real life consequences. Could Nissan tighten up their QC ? I'm sure they could.

Do they want to ? Judge by what comes out of the factory.

* Tesla allows 1 mv.

[SageBrush]

We're certainly not going to be buying a new battery any time soon. But it's just as certain that it's premature to state unequivocally that doing so would be absolutely the wrong choice, or especially that as an alternative we should be looking to spend six times as much on a brand new car, where we'll lose as much value in the first year or two of ownership as two batteries would cost.

We own two vehicles:
2018 Tesla Model 3
2013, second-hand cheap LEAF

One car
One golf-cart

Works very well for us. Match the tool to the job.

[peted]

You are ignoring a lot:

1. The battery is not covered by your insurance.
2. The maintenance costs that come with an older car
3. That $9k buys you a golf cart range car. That was OK in 2011, not today

1. Neither are depreciation costs.
2. Our oldest car is nearly 30 years old. The next oldest is 22 years old. Annual maintenance costs on each is less than $1000. And that's for gas powered vehicles, which are a lot more needy. Our LEAF has required essentially no maintenance; the only thing we've actually paid significant money for in six years of ownership are two new tires (I wasn't willing to splurge on a full set of four when one had been damaged beyond repair and required replacement).
3. What was okay in 2011 (or 2013 when we bought the car) is still okay for us. A new battery would be perfectly adequate for the type of driving this particular car will be used for (for that matter, the failing battery will be fine for the vast majority of the driving...it just means we'll wind up in one of the ICE cars more often than we'd prefer).

I have to admit, I do find it amusing the number of people who feel that they can state without reservation what makes the most sense for me. We all have different priorities, different budgets, different willingness to extend said budgets, and any number of other factors that go into this sort of decision-making.

I appreciate the input, but the advice would be better-presented if it came strictly with factual statements, rather than value judgments that make assumptions about the factors at play in my particular situation (for example, making a claim as to what is or is not "OK").

[WetEV]

One golf-cart

Golf cart for the win!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lilnFCxU7A

[SageBrush]

I appreciate the input, but the advice would be better-presented if it came strictly with factual statements, rather than value judgments that make assumptions about the factors at play in my particular situation (for example, making a claim as to what is or is not "OK").

By 'not OK' I was talking about cost/range Nissan is charging, not about you at all.

I'm not sure why you emphasize Tesla depreciation for the first year or two if you plan to keep longer, but if your assumptions are correct about the depreciation then buy a 2 year old Tesla

[peted]

You can only say everything you said was relayed correctly from your source.

If you make an untrue statement, and I quote that statement, saying you said it, then everything I said is true. All I've said is that you said something. That your statement was untrue doesn't make mine untrue as well.

Every day is new so this could simply be a policy change by Nissan but the thought of 24 kwh packs being old and no longer manufactured is something we need to lose because that is not true.

I definitely don't know what relevance that has to my statements. I never wrote anything about whether it's true that 24 kWh are or are not available, never mind made a claim as to why that might or might not be the case.

TBT; Even if it was a 30 kwh pack, I can't figure out a decent TCO on your situation due to wildly different experiences regarding degradation. I know people with 120,000 miles on their 2015 24 kwh pack and not even halfway to losing their first bar along with 30 kwh owners who are on the cusp of their 2ND pack replacement under warranty...

Sure. As I mentioned in the outset, our battery pack only showed significant signs of degradation after we started seeing the problem with the 12V battery getting run down and the dealer asked us to try to reproduce it (they wanted us to be able to bring the car in immediately after it happened, to check the stored error codes...this pattern was repeated several times over a short period).

There is a possibility that we could buy a new battery pack and, taking better care of it, it would last for eight, ten, or whatever years, vs the six we are looking at now (and to be clear, the current battery pack isn't dead...it's just that we're seeing enough loss of range that we're noticing it in our daily use of the car). Of course, it's also possible that the newer battery pack would be manufactured even more poorly than the one that came with the car, and wouldn't last even as long.

It's dangerous, trying to predict the future. The best I know how to do is look at the past and extrapolate from there, modifying that analysis only when presented with facts that clearly give a reason to.