How long do you expect your Leaf to be motoring?

My Nissan Leaf Forum

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Joined
Jun 10, 2022
Messages
20
Location
Lincolnshire, England
My previous car was a 1969 Wolseley 18/85 Automatic, I sold it to an enthusiast who has restored it to concours condition, re-built the engine and transmission and exhibits it at car shows. He expects it to see its second half-century. It's seen out 2019, it'll see 2069 if there's still fuel to run it on.

I didn't buy the Leaf new, it's a 2013 model. It has few moving parts, and if you don't let it rust, and replace cells when they die, it should last forever. I need my kids (they're 12 and twins) to teach me how to use Leaf Spy to do the diagnostics on the cells.

They'll inherit it.

I don't see any reason why EVs shouldn't last a century, rather than a decade. Tyres and brakes wear out, cells need replacing, but the basic structure is sound. What do you think?
 
Now that I've got a (newish) 40 kWh battery pack in my 2011 Leaf, I expect at least another 10 years out of the car. My expectation is that (even with battery degradation) I will not have to do another pack replacement to keep it as a daily driver. My Leaf is turning out to be the best car I have ever owned!
 
It doesn't happen very often but Leafs(and probably all newer computer-controlled, complicated cars) can have failures that to fix can approach the value of the car. If you are OK without the feature(such as no heat which would render a vehicle in my state "summer only" due to iced-up windows and such) you can keep driving it but other very expensive failures such as the ABS brake module and such can basically render the vehicle undrivable without 1000s and 1000s of dollars worth of repairs.
Back in the days of slant 6's and such you didn't have the possibility of these expensive failures, all you had were regular brakes which would require the occasional brake job of 200-500 dollars, maybe the master cylinder could go bad but again probably less than $500 and as engines didn't generally blow up, it would probably just require the occasional tune-up of a couple of hundred dollars or so.
Modern cars have lots of parts again that could approach the value or be more than the car is worth and pushing it to the limits of life, you might start running into such things. Modern cars can be quite nice but I'd say they are more disposable than cars of the past and there will probably come a time it's just not worth fixing, no matter how much you've maintained it. I personally think 10 years is a good selling point to reduce the chance of having a very expensive repair that might sideline the vehicle, you could push more but again eventually you'll have to make the decision if the car is worth it when something very expensive goes :(
 
Stanton said:
Now that I've got a (newish) 40 kWh battery pack in my 2011 Leaf, I expect at least another 10 years out of the car. My expectation is that (even with battery degradation) I will not have to do another pack replacement to keep it as a daily driver. My Leaf is turning out to be the best car I have ever owned!

Mine came with 77450 miles on the clock, and it's still showing 9 bars of battery health. I've got a Leaf spy and some day this week I'll have a shiny new Android phone to interrogate it, and put up the statistics so the techies in this forum can tell me whether it's worth my while replacing any of the cells - three seemed to be a bit low when I checked it (with my kids' Android phone) but in another thread it's been pointed out that they might only be a few millivolts low, the scale on the Leaf Spy software isn't 0 - 5V per cell, it's compressed to around the mean value per cell).

How come your batteries were dead after only 84k? My new Leaf is perilously close to that mileage.
 
The 2011 and 2012 Leafs, plus 2013 Leafs built before April of 2013*, all have batteries that degrade very quickly, even more so in hotter climates. Batteries are usually replaced because the available range has gotten too low, not because they have actually failed.


* Check the build month on the driver's side door sill sticker.
 
Iboughtanoldone said:
Stanton said:
Now that I've got a (newish) 40 kWh battery pack in my 2011 Leaf, I expect at least another 10 years out of the car. My expectation is that (even with battery degradation) I will not have to do another pack replacement to keep it as a daily driver. My Leaf is turning out to be the best car I have ever owned!

Mine came with 77450 miles on the clock, and it's still showing 9 bars of battery health. I've got a Leaf spy and some day this week I'll have a shiny new Android phone to interrogate it, and put up the statistics so the techies in this forum can tell me whether it's worth my while replacing any of the cells - three seemed to be a bit low when I checked it (with my kids' Android phone) but in another thread it's been pointed out that they might only be a few millivolts low, the scale on the Leaf Spy software isn't 0 - 5V per cell, it's compressed to around the mean value per cell).

How come your batteries were dead after only 84k? My new Leaf is perilously close to that mileage.
There's basically 2 questions here (unrelated)...
1) Your Leaf is basically following the "normal" ageing process (I can guess it's an older Gen1), which typically means replacing a cell here or there won't do you much good: you need a complete pack replacement.
2) This is actually my third battery pack replacement: the second one was a warranty replacement (down 4 capacity bars) by Nissan a few years ago. The second pack was only down 2 capacity bars at the time of my upgrade, but I seized the opportunity of finding a "new" 40 kWh pack...which also allowed me to get a decent return on the 24 kWh pack. There's a lot packed in there (no pun intended), and you can read about my experience here (https://www.myeva.org/blog/keeping-your-nissan-leaf).
 
Iboughtanoldone said:
I don't see any reason why EVs shouldn't last a century, rather than a decade. Tyres and brakes wear out, cells need replacing, but the basic structure is sound. What do you think?

I wish you luck, but realize that there currently is no nationwide battery upgrade/replacement option available at a reasonable cost. So, unless Nissan decides to make that a viable option, you need to try to find a salvage title newer LEAF with a healthy battery pack and then have that battery physically swapped for your existing pack. You also then need to have installed a third party CANBUS bridge that will trick your LEAF into accepting the new pack.

In short, this isn't a trivial undertaking and a lot of luck is needed too.

The sad reality is that for most LEAF owners, their cars will end up on the scrap heap once the battery pack is no longer providing adequate range.

Hopefully standardized third party LEAF battery packs become a viable market in the future, but we've been speculating for years now on when that might happen. I'm not optimistic that it ever will.
 
EVs Enhanced in New Zealand seems to have a real replacement battery product. Of course, it hasn't shipped yet in volume but they claim late 2022 for NZ market.

Whether they decide to ship abroad and whether that will be worth it is still TBD but I'd say that the knowledge is there, it's just the raw materials and market size that are the limiting factors.
 
goldbrick said:
EVs Enhanced in New Zealand seems to have a real replacement battery product. Of course, it hasn't shipped yet in volume but they claim late 2022 for NZ market.

Whether they decide to ship abroad and whether that will be worth it is still TBD but I'd say that the knowledge is there, it's just the raw materials and market size that are the limiting factors.

I don't know much about Nissan Leaves (Leafs?) having only just got one, an OBD II dongle, and a Leaf Spy Pro, which I have not yet actually tried together, I had previously relied on one of my twin kids (they've gone back to school) to implement the Android phone, a technology which I'm not familiar with; but I do know a bit about Physics. Lithium is the element that gets used up as a battery degrades, and can be recycled back to elemental lithium for new batteries. We will have to start recycling lithium sooner rather than later because there is only so much to be dug out out of the ground. The day that recycled lithium costs less than virgin lithium hasn't arrived yet. It's not that far off.

What happens to batteries that no longer give an acceptable range? Do they just get dumped? If so, we'll be mining those lithium dumps before long.
 
More chemistry than physics, but you are correct: lithium will soon be "mined" from old batteries much more consistently then it is now. As for old packs with low range: they get snapped up for solar storage. Even a badly degraded Leaf pack is much more energy dense than a bank of lead-acid batteries.
 
Iboughtanoldone said:
We will have to start recycling lithium sooner rather than later because there is only so much to be dug out out of the ground. The day that recycled lithium costs less than virgin lithium hasn't arrived yet. It's not that far off.

Recycling is important long term, as mining is damaging.


There is a lot more lithium to mine (and otherwise collect) than that.

Most of the lithium we use today comes from dry lake beds. This is really cheap to extract.

There are also salty ground water with lots of lithium. This would also be cheap to extract, but isn't being done much yet.

Most of the lithium to mine we know about is in rocks. This is where lithium used to be mined from. There is at least several order of magnitude more lithium in rocks, probably more than enough for an EV for everyone on the planet.

There is even more lithium in the ocean.
 
WetEV, you sound like a lithium expert. Your post was interesting, I'd like to learn more, if only to refute people who say 'your EV is just as damaging to the planet as an ICE, because of the environmental cost of manufacture'. I didn't realise lithium was so plentiful.

Also, in your signature, you mention that one of your Leaves was 'totalled'. There's a lot of energy in a lithium-ion battery. Is there an explosion risk if the battery integrity is breached?
 
I'll take that last one. First, virtually all EVs have battery packs that are armored and located away from the edges of the car, making severe damage unlikely. Second, Nissan uses a lithium chemistry that isn't optimum in every way, but IS near optimum at being stable. There are no known Leaf fires that started in the battery.
 
LeftieBiker said:
Nissan uses a lithium chemistry that isn't optimum in every way, but IS near optimum at being stable.

I'd like to know more. I suspect others would too. Has this topic been covered in previous threads, to which you can refer me? Or a website?

I'm a physicist, which almost by definition means I'm an information hoover. I like to understand the technology I'm using.
 
this is a good link discussing the battery chemistry of the current 2018 and newer LEAF: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1117928_2018-nissan-leaf-battery-technology-a-deep-dive

and it is indeed remarkable that there are no known impact / self combustion fires caused by a LEAF battery since 2010 in over 500,000 vehicles worldwide...compare that to Tesla / GM / etc and it's a pretty amazing record!
 
When you get back, I'm intrigued by 'Leftie Biker'. I am left-handed and also considered on the left in politics, somewhere between Leon Trotsky and Prince Peter Kropotkin, a political position I consider as rational in the face of our current environmental crisis. I'd accept the label 'Socialist'.

As regards 'biker', I'm a blood biker, https://www.bloodbikes.org.uk/ , I don't actually own a motorbike but I get to take blood, tissue and organs across the UK on a 700 cc machine from the place where someone donates rare blood or dies thus donating an organ to where someone needs it. I get to ride a donated (by public subscription) motorbike at highly illegal speeds with blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, Across the Pennines (mountains through the middle of Northern England) I am normally accompanied by police cars clearing the way, but once we get into an urban area, such as are typically found around hospitals, the police cars are confined to roads, whereas I can go up on pavements (US: sidewalks) to get through rush-hour traffic. It's a huge adrenaline rush, and you get to save lives. The bike is free, but you have to pay for your own petrol (US: gasoline). A small price to pay for the ultimate petrolhead experience.

I'd love to ride an electric motorbike - electric cars accelerate fast enough as it is, I'd imagine an electric motorbike would be stunningly fast.
 
Some electric bikes are very fast, others not. I briefly owned a defective Zero SR and that was very hard accelerating - arm dislocating hard. My Vectrix behaves more like a Maxi scooter, which it is. Not sedate, and it will climb hills at 65MPH, but it's limited to 68MPH.

Now about the door sill sticker: it's migrated about 8", to the flat area just outside the sill, on the right. I'll upload the photo later - very tired.

My handle refers both to handedness (I was born a lefty, switched by nuns, then became ambidextrous) and I'm also of the socialist Left. Maybe it should be "AmbiBiker"...
 
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