oops, misspelled that. Liquid temperature regulating like the Volt has. ;)

Nissan's wounds are self-inflicted and were easily predictable. Sadly, they may also create an anti-halo effect on this entire segment of vehicles. The company recklessly rolled the dice by putting a not ready for prime time product on the market and hoping that early adopters would be like Apple fanboys, just happy to be along for the ride and part of something bigger than themselves.

Two years ago, Nick Chambers wrote on this site about Elon Musk's misgivings about Leaf battery technology - http://www.plugincars.com/tesla-ceo-rips-nissans-battery-technology-says... . Not all of Musk's predictions have come true but he basically knew about which he spoke. A year ago, Chambers wrote a piece ( http://www.plugincars.com/next-gen-leaf-nissan-will-make-regional-tweaks... ) about how Nissan would address the shortcomings, including it's passively cooled battery and it's need for "regional tweaks" in which he tells of Nissan's Mark Perry explaining his company's plan to address the car's shortcomings, thus acknowledging said shortcomings and the company's full knowledge of them, in the 2013 model refresh.

Now, a chair is not a house and a house is not a home and a car is not an iPad. When people spend half a years salary on a car and plan to use it for getting to work, driving their kids to school and play-dates and activities or other normal activities, their fanboy, early adopter enthusiasm is very likely to be tested if the car neither performs these activities nor as advertised. Nissan was apparently counting on these folks to be so excited to be driving in the future that they would ignore these "initial shortcomings" just like the company from which they bought the vehicle.

Lastly, Nissan is a big company is no excuse for not dealing quickly and satisfactorily with these issues. The Leaf is a very important, high priority, high profile vehicle for Nissan and the electric car movement as a whole. Nissan announced just before launch that it was preparing a "rapid-reaction task force" made up of technicians and engineers to "tackle any niggles the electric car may have" as quickly as possible. Obviously they recognized that problems would crop up and they need to be dealt with immediately and in a way that says "this car and everyone who drives it are very special and important to us." That's the kind of attention that Leaf owners expect and deserve. Apparently, many are not getting it.

Finally, I just want to add that this gamble of Nissan's, to release a product whose shortcomings were obvious enough that the company had already planned to address them in two years, was made in order to keep down development costs and meet a production deadline. Obviously, missing the release date would have signaled problems. But, since the company saved money not addressing problems about which they were already aware, there should have been a company directive from the start to address these predictable "niggles" by immediately swapping batteries or even offering trade-ins. They saved money on development. Set some of that aside to deal with the inevitable problems that cutting costs and rushing to market were going to cause.

The difference in response from Nissan compared to GM is amazing. GM has been bending over backwards to address any issue no matter how small or large. Every Volt owner has a dedicated support person and the whole on-start team to help but there does not seem anybody at Nissan willing to help car owners with serious problems.

I was one of the biggest Leaf fan boys until I actually owned one. I feel so lucky that I was able to trade mine in at only a modest loss.

The range is a huge issue but on top of that I could not see anybody buying a second hand Leaf with a 3.3Kwh charger. Only after you actually have been hanging around Wallgreens for 1 1/2 hours waiting for your car to get enough charge to get home can you appreciate how much of a deal it is to get a 6.6Kwh charger.

I really want to support the ev industry but I agree that Nissan has pushed us too far by not supporting the first generation owners. Bad Nissan.

I don't understand why this crap car is still selling, i said many time that bev are suppar costly bad solution. This is very deceiving to write simple things for nothing, are internet blogging sites there for nothing ?? This product is offered by the same petro-car cartel then before and it just representing false contradictive publicity stunt that is not sincere for 1 minutes. All they are doing for real is to add value to gasoline price by showing painfully that there is no alternative except to pay more for a bev lose money then go back for a bigger gasoline car when you understood that there is no alternative.

Nissan's response has been quite a bit different with GM's Volt. If you recall the 2-3 Volt fires from a while back when everyone was at GM's neck over safety, GM did all kinds of stuff. They gave out loaner cars, they even accepted returns of the Volts. Then in few short weeks/months they fixed the problem.

Nissan on the other hand, is basically telling it's customers to go buy some smores and roast them. Especially with the comments about the LCD display not working.

I don't think the Leaf will ultimately hurt the reputation of EVs. If anything it's probably just translated into more business for GM. Maybe 2013 will be a better year for Leaf though.

I would say that from a PR standpoint, the Leaf's Phoenix Syndrome is the equivalent of the Volt's battery being a fire hazard when left fully charged and wrecked for two weeks. The clock is ticking. Owner's are badmouthing their cars, armchair quarterbacks are screaming "I told you so!" from the sidelines and the Anonymous are coming out of the shadows like so many zombies to generalize the few to the many. Pretty disgusting.

Meaningless, Honest_Diablo. There's something like 13,000 Leaf in the US and about 0.3% have a problem (info source Wikipedia.)

How many Ford Focus EVs are out there? About 100? When there are tens of thousands of Focus EVs on the road, it will be interesting to see what pops up in the way of problems.

George B's comments hit home for me.

I'm not blaming the victim, Ionic. It seems, though, that a lot of the anti-Leaf comments here are piling on from people who never liked the idea of a pure EV in the first place, aren't considering ever owning one and would simply want to see EVs fail on any account.

You, on the other hand, legitimately bought into the ownership of Leaf and the Nissan owes you, at the least, a new battery. I hope they do the right thing by you. But don't expect Nissan to instantly start swapping batteries into cars that belong to every owner who calls or emails. I can understand their position in this, if not completely empathizing with their public relations approach shown so far.

0.3% is in relation to total number of Leafs sold in the US (13,000) . . . not the percentage of affected Leafs in Phoenix. And, yes, it is legitimate to cite that statistic. We've got people here exclaiming crazy stuff, like every year-old Leaf is going through this battery depletion problem. If those affected simply exaggerate the problem, it's only going to make Nissan even more recalcitrant to properly deal with it.

These problems and this thread reminded me of a post I did over two years ago here, before the LEAF was even launched: http://www.plugincars.com/no-active-thermal-management-did-nissan-make-r...

Sorry, Arizona EV Pilot, I don't wish anyone who bought a Leaf to be stuck with a car that is quickly diminishing in range. I'm also disappointed to hear about Andy Palmer's comments in the Australian press. Doesn't he know in this internet age that people half way around the world are going to be comparing notes?

The problem IS real and I think I've gone on record enough times stating that. I also have made it very clear that I think Nissan owes quite a few batteries to Arizona Leaf owners and many also agree that they will eventually honor that commitment. Failure to do so will cost them far more in funds and reputation in the long run.

But, in Nissan's defense, they are going to have to take some time to intelligently evaluate what specific extenuating factors are leading to all of this. They can't start swapping batteries out over every car instantly without at least carefully observing what is going on. Nobody will learn what the real problem is if they instantly do that.

Unrelated to Leaf batteries, I completely defend my observation that there is a rather large and vocal contingent populating this blog (not just this topic thread) who are no friend to the concept of pure electric cars in general and the Leaf in particular. I've voiced criticisms of the Leaf regrading sheet metal styling and, specifically, the rear hatch design. I've also praised it on unrelated issues of road worthiness and (for me) being a very practical automobile. It's also one of the safest automobiles in the world to be in during a collision and I find that to be a particularly valuable asset.

But there are some here whose consistent vitriol for this car seems to be an uncontrollable passion. They hate everything about it and are relentless in their pursuit to tell everyone withing earshot of this . . . and they have never even seen one, ridden in one or test driven one . . . much less lived with one for several weeks (like I have) or leased or or own one. No, they just hate the damn thing for no good f**king reason. Period. Those are the people I'm talking about.

As far as I can tell, Curran, the one thing that is almost completely consistent is exposure to high heat and Phoenix, in particular, being a particular troublesome area. Higher than average miles (14,000 per year or more) is often an extenuating factor, but not always. Some have never quick charged. Some park exclusively is shaded area, don't charge to 100% when it's super hot, or consistently get down to the 20% range . . . and they might do all of that at 120V exclusively. Yet they have still lost bars.

Far fewer, percentage wise (I don't have numbers, but I know of some) have lost bars in Tucson. But the year round ambient temperature is almost consistently 10°F cooler down here than in Phoenix. That 10° year round average might be enough of a difference in most situations.

A little automotive history: Back in the late 1940s, Crosley developed a lightweight engine block, called the COBRA, which dispensed with heavy cast iron and was largely crafted from sheets of pressed tin and brazed together . . .

http://crosleyautoclub.com/Mighty_Tin.html

As you'll read on this link, the engine didn't hold up well under real world situations and the company was soon forced to return to the older cast iron design.

Could the current non-actively cooled battery pack on the Leaf be the new COBRA? Could a liquid cooled battery for the Leaf be their version of cast iron? Perhaps.

@Curran

Hi Curran,

Don’t get panicked into dumping your LEAF. I live in Tucson and have had my LEAF for over 14 months now. I certainly have no intention of letting Nissan off the hook as far as standing behind their product – or of misleading you. But I HAVE HAD NO PROBLEMS WITH MY LEAF. (Wish I could say the same for my Blink charger!) The threshold temperature for LEAF battery problems must be somewhere between the average for Phoenix and Tucson. I would be interested in knowing if any Tucson LEAF owners have had battery problems. But I haven’t.

How are you going to get your LEAF down here? I’ve been tempted to buy a 220 volt Siemens level 2 charger from Home Depot. It would be interesting to try a road trip with one in your cargo hold, recharging along the way. AAA was / is supposedly supporting road recharges. Maybe they would let you ‘plug in’. let’s find some way to get in touch when you arrive

This is what happens when you "oversell" a car, which 95% of the people on this forum do. They tell people range anxiety is just in their head. Now it turns out the anxiety was well founded. They told people that the Volt is not the answer with its ICE range extender, yet the Leaf buyers are trading them in for Volts. They told people about how they got over 100 miles on a charge, but who drives at a steady 40 mph on the freeway with the heating and A/C off.

Time for an EV reality check.

Yeah, but . . . and here again, now with Michael . . . we're getting a toned-down version of "Revenge AGAINST The Electric Car." Nobody has been declaring here in the last couple of years that the Leaf would get 100 miles per charge, but the car does get an honest 70 around town, unless you drive like a maniac.

Nobody deserves to have a car where the battery is prematurely depleting but, if the prospective owners weren't intelligent enough to pre-qualify themselves in terms of realistic properly-functioning range potential before they bought one (ie: minimum daily requirement 60 mile daily commute, no chance to charge at work, etc.?) whose fault is that? Not the car's.

EVs are fine, if you're smart enough to figure how far you drive on any given day. It's just as stupid to blame an EV for this as it is to universally declare that, say, a Triumph TR4 is a bad car, just because there's not enough room for the wife, 3 kids and a couple of sheets of plywood all at once.

Time for a clueless car-buying consumer reality check . . . every day!

"Fewer and fewer of my fellow motorists do any of the above any longer"
. . . and very few of those fellow motorists are going to get 70 miles out of their Leaf now are they. I quote Leaf range for normal people. Normal people drive because they have somewhere to go and aren't just out to kill time taking up space on the road.
I guess you're saying that the Leaf is only good for "mid-Victorian souls". Horses work for them too.

* In my previous post, I meant "above 50F", not "about 50F"

@ex-EV1,

Fine, change it to "whether or not one agrees with that reason". Some people are so literal. (guilty, btw) I kind of see your point. We don't want to tell people they have to drive in such-and-such a way in order to have a useful EV. Your post does sound very condescending towards Ben, though.

@Benjamin Need,
I don't try to pass myself off as being normal. In fact, I try to pull ahead of the crowd at every opportunity.
However, that isn't the issue. The issue is that there are a lot of normal people who drive many miles per day, consuming large amounts of non-sustainable gasoline, spewing large amounts of pollution.
When the bottom-of-the-barrel car company makes and sells a minimal piece of junk it doesn't do anyone any good if zealots over-sell it as meeting the needs of those normal people. When they don't buy the car, they, then marginalize these people by calling them "maniacs" or "teenage boys".
Lets not waste our time on those who don't drive very far and focus on those who do. They are the ones creating the most demand for oil and polluting the most.
The Leaf, by itself, is a solution to a problem that really doesn't exist.
With workplace, opportunity, and/or fast charging, this could change.
This won't happen if the slow-lane EV advocates don't quit promoting the Leaf to those who don't want it and start pushing for the charging infrastructure that it needs to be useful.

Well, ex-EV1, I generally agree with what you've just said above. But I wouldn't recommend someone buy a Leaf If I knew they had a long daily commute . . . especially if it involves extensive freeway travel, which, as you know, kills range a lot quicker than stop-and-go driving in any pure EV. That said, I do know quite a few surface street driver here with similar requirements to mine that would love the Leaf, if they only knew about it.

Not to beat a dead horse, the local EAA chapter met this past Saturday (mostly to flesh out the club's NPID details.) We talked at length about the Leaf battery controversy. Most of these guys are home converter types and are perfectly happy with their lead acid battery / 30 mile range cars. We did have one of our Leaf owners there, though, and his thoughts were illuminating.

He described the rather extensive vetting process he received from Nissan when he first expressed interest in the car and it was apparent they they were very careful at that point to not sell to people who had extended range requirements. Likewise with the whole process of getting Ecotality to wire there garages with wireless internet, to
monitor owner's home charging habits, etc.

So, I have to wonder if individual Nissan dealers didn't properly qualify subsequent buyers. If someone really does do an 80 mile daily commute and doesn't have a reliable workplace charging scenario for their Leaf, I simply have to ask "Why did they buy one?"

Hmmm . . . in that article, Nick said he didn't drive aggressively and spent "most of the time going five miles per hour under the posted speed limits". He further stated that a 55mph road was the maximum posted speed encountered, so he probably would have been doing 50mph most of the time.

He further noted the "gently rolling topography on roads that went through towns with stoplights and 30 miles per hour zones." You'd likely have a fair amount of regenerative breaking opportunities on such terrain. And, it's further noted, the last 15 miles of the 116 mile trip was driven "10 miles under the posted speed limit" That's a BIG difference from getting on the freeway and moving at a constant 65 or 70mph on flat terrain and expecting similar range.

About a month after Nick wrote his Plug In Cars Leaf article, this one appeared on the Autoweek web site . . .

http://www.autoweek.com/article/20101122/GREEN/101129960

. . . and, by this time, an official EPA range of 73 miles per full charge was public knowledge. While this EPA statistic stands in contrast to Nissan's more optimistic 80 to 100 miles per charge (stated in the article and, they say, based on mostly city driving) - not to mention Nick Cambers' "walking on eggshells" mileage test for Plug In Cars - it's not as if an EPA number wasn't out there for public consumption before the car went on sale.

I guess I don't see any great deception. You have to get past the sensationalistic headline in Nick's piece and actually read the article. While Nick went out of his way to squeeze every last mile out of the Leaf during his hilly, countryside and lower-than-average speed drive, I experienced numbers that were on par with - or slightly better than - the official 73 mile EPA range numbers on any given day, driving in a realistically proportioned fashion on mostly flat surface streets in a city at the maximum posted speeds between 30 and 45mph.

Without resorting to name-calling (maniac, teenager, etc,) it's fairly obvious that if you constantly drive around town overly-aggressively, or spend most of that time at constant freeway speeds (which wouldn't qualify as an irresponsible driving style,) your mileage figures will drop precipitously.

. . . but all of the above assumes that the battery's capacity isn't depleting prematurely.

Here's an interesting article that just got posted over on Green Car Reports regarding the Phoenix Leafs, detailing independent tests conducted there by Tony Williams, who contributed to this thread 6 days ago announcing such . . .

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1079244_independent-tests-show-nissa...

On a related note, over on Hybrid Cars, here's a report on the battery expected to be included on the 2013 Leaf . . .

http://www.hybridcars.com/news/nissan-leaf-get-new-battery-pack-51774.html

There is, of course, mention of the heat-related loss issue.

I also want to reiterate that I hope Nissan will do something positive for customers who have seen their Leaf batteries age prematurely and that the new 2013 battery pack design properly addresses all these heat-related degradation problems.

The Leaf battery warranty does not cover loss of capacity but it does cover loss of power output. In other words, the warranty DOES cover loss of capacity if the capacity is zero.

If I were a Leaf owner in a hot climate I would run the piss out of my car from now until it fails. I'd quick charge as much as possible but never charge more than 80% as that would void the warranty. When the car is charging I'd make sure the car is sitting in the hot afternoon Sun with windows rolled up. (Nissan says the warranty is voided if the car is exposed to 120 F for more than 24 continuous hours but where on Earth would it get to 120 at night?) I'd load the car up to it's rated carrying capacity and run the air conditioner on high. I would take drives through steep mountains in the hottest weather, every day. (I wonder if driving with a parachute attached to the car would void the warranty)

Then I'd wait until Nissan comes out with their improved battery and have it replaced under warranty... and remove the parachute.

And, to add to this, cobflyer is the sort of person ready to adapt to the requirements of an EV and smithjim1961, if his post was written with any seriousness, is exactly the sort of person who isn't.

I used to work in a music store and sold guitar amps to teenage rock star wannabes. Some of these kids would go home and abuse the thing just to see how quickly it would blow up. The warranty would cover a replacement most of the time but, if the same kid would come back next year to "try out" the new model amplifier, we'd show them the door and tell them to shop elsewhere.

Most of the people who have Leaf battery issues didn't abuse their cars. They have legitimate claims. The purposeful abuser isn't helping their cause, only making matters worse for everyone.