Nissan says Leaf batteries will outlast the car by 10-12 years
electrek.co
electrek.co
See https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/29/nissans-long-strange-tr...
A friend of mine recently bought a Nissan Leaf with low miles on it for $9k. It was less than 5 years old and it cost more than $30k new. The original owner lost way more money on resale than he ever would have spent on a gas car in 5 years, including paying for the gas.
I don't drive much, but then I don't remember any childhood cars of my parents being at end of life at 10 years, and those were used in daily commutes.
Do the batteries decay over time? If a Leaf only has say 8k miles a year, will the batteries simply fail to hold charge after 22 years?
This likely means that a majority of Leaf cars will need repairs that cost more than the car is worth on the market, while the battery still has value, although likely not in a new car as they will be worn out a bit and technology will have ten years to improve by then. Elon Musk has already said that Telsa is planning on re-using batteries from Telsa cars into on-grid batteries, where weight is less of an issue, so partial batteries are fine. That’s likely what will happen to Leaf batteries in 10 years too.
Both in Europe and in the US, average age of vehicles on the road is given as ~ 11 years, while average age at scrappage is given as ~ 15 years.
How do you even make an age distribution that agrees with those numbers? How do you make those numbers agree with the statistics of vehicles sold per year, which is relatively steady?
The age of on the road vehicles can be skewed by new cars. The age of scrappage can equally be skewed by a few new cars written off and as such, scrapped. Then we do not know average time of the road, the transition time of sitting in a garage/off-road and then scrapped a few years later. That could be a short period or decades. That again would skew averages.
As you can see - I have a pet hate about averages when they just use the mean average. Without knowing the other two averages or complete access to the data-sets - a biased perspective can and will be the outcome more often than not.
It's like a company employing 100 people - 99 earn 10k a year and one earns 1 million a year. The company can and often will say that their employees earn on average 19.9k a year. When the median and mode forms of averages would both in this instance yield an answer of 10k.
I'd be most happy if any use of averages has to include all 3 forms of averages - after all, we do teach them in school's, let's use them and save so much confusion, bias and statistical abuse.
If it grows faster than sales, fewer cars must be taken of the road.
Could be as simple as households holding on to cars longer because they cannot afford to replace them, because modern cars last longer, or because they can afford to have a second/third car in the garage, but not a new one.
Road salt and Ocean Air destroys car bodies. The drivetrain can be fine, but the body just falls apart around it.
There's going to be an interesting time for Used Cars coming up, with all the electronics and complex parts. Where cars could be worked on in your garage or local shop, now need a trip to a dealer to work out the Electronic Wizardry.
Followed by the dying out of non-diesel ICE shops turning into just Brake and Tire places.
And if you have a common car (like my parents’ Corolla), an ambiguous code can tell a lot when you check the internet and you get directed to the most common failure mode.
Also, car maintence costs have exceeded inflation over time: https://www.officialdata.org/Motor-vehicle-maintenance-and-r...
As you experienced, spending $500 to keep a $1500 car from becoming a brick is a great value.
If/when I have the time, my plan is to take cars like this and part them out. Lots of people out there willing to pay for a working OEM part to de-Brick their car.
If you’re patient enough; selling rims one by one would pay off. Nobody really wants to replace all 4 when they really needed one.
Let's say a transmission replacement costs $1000 for your car (that's low, by the way). You could sell your car now for $1500 and buy a another one, or you can spend $1000 keeping it on the road for a few more years, sell it for less than it is worth now, and then buy another one. That $1000 was wasted since you had to buy another car anyway -- you would have saved that $1000 if you bought the replacement car sooner.
My bigger worry is if I get into an accident, the value of the car is so low that the insurance will total it, and now I'm stuck with buying a new car.
That only works if you can see into the future and know that you will need transmission work soon, and then it requires you to find a buyer who doesn't share that opinion. Essentially, you have to screw someone over.
Otherwise, if the transmission is already broken, the situation is that you either pay $1000 and get a working car (ie. repair the transmission) or sell your car for $500 and then buy a new one.
Think about any product using rechargeable batteries that you have ever owned, and you'll get the idea. There will be a gradual reduction in range until the batteries really need to be replaced.
What are the big-battery people doing to get 22 year life that can't be downsized for small batteries? Is there some fundamental reason we can't have mobile devices where the battery is good for two decades?
Our phones are under powered though, so the batteries are stretched to their limits and therefore don't last as long.
I’m thinking it could be heat related. That machine heats up because I use it for “desktop” tasks. But Apple long ago stopped making laptops aimed at being cool internally and cool to the touch.
Give it up, this particular ship has sailed and we're all better off for it. We aren't going back to flaky, vibration-sensitive IC sockets and user-replaceable drive controller PCBs, and the same trend will inevitably appear at higher levels. Hardware has never been more reliable than it is today, and hardwired integration is a big reason for that.
Maybe this average is a result of accidents after a certain age. Almost any accident in a 15 year old car will cost more than the vehicle to fix professionally. I was surprised by the number though (which, to be fair, they didn't actually list).
The battery is the most costly part of an EV but battery prices are falling rapidly. The rest of an EV is simpler and has fewer moving parts than a gas car and will probably last longer.
When I'm in CA, people in parking lots often strike up conversations about the car like it's a classic and make offers to buy it. Police never take any interest in me since it's so common for people to drive old cars in a place they continue working just fine. The culture is completely different, I often wonder how much of it is due to the road salt alone.
It's also racial. I drove with a cracked windshield for almost a year when I was at University of Cincinnati. A black friend was amazed and said if he did that he'd get pulled over within days.
I suggest a great North-south car swap, where one side mitigates the climate damage caused by the other.
This sort of "value engineering" is quite common today, especially since things like advanced computer simulation can make it easy to design the lifetime of a part within a surprisingly small tolerance. Before that, manufacturers would often err on the side of overbuilding to avoid premature failures.
Or was this a cost decision that can’t be explained by incompetence?
For me personally it’s been an epiphany that I rank up there with the internet and the iphone.
My take these days is I select a chassis that is suitable, match it with a battery that covers 99 out of 100 trips and with apple/android car finally that differentiator is kind of gone.
The leaf could pack our double buggy/pram and three kids which is enough for 99 of 100.
Ideally I can drive it until the chassis is worn out, or the battery needs replacing.
An ICE is really a very complex piece of machinery. Lots of $ plowed down to get them where we are today.
They may be useful for permanent utility grid installations, but you won’t see lead acid batteries powering electric cars.
https://energy.ehawaii.gov/epd/public/energy-project-details...