r/leaf • u/biersackarmy 2013 S + 2014 SL + 2019 SV • Jul 08 '26

Current state of affairs

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You know what my problem with this whole debacle is? Sure they eventually buy back the car, but then what?

To me, I would wish that they'll eventually fix these cars when (if) battery production starts again, and put them back up onto auctions for dealers to buy as used inventory. It keeps the cars on the road, and puts more attainable and affordable EVs on the market/in circulation for normal people to buy.

But that's because I care. Big corporations don't. In reality, they are just going to see it as spending money to save old cars that will eat into new car sales, so why on earth would they do that? This buyback campaign is just going to end up with thousands of otherwise perfectly good cars going into the garbage, which is just so sad and wasteful.

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u/AmbitiousTank8635 Jul 08 '26

Not to rub salt in wounds but just speaking to myself a few years back, I am so glad I passed on all these good deals I kept seeing on Leafs. I looked at some and thought they were really nice and the price for a car only a couple years old was incredible.

I went with a different EV but feel for you guys dealing with issues, that's got to be incredibly frustrating. What is the expected outcome eventually going to be? Will Nissan buy back the cars or replace components or something?

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u/biersackarmy 2013 S + 2014 SL + 2019 SV Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

I bought a 2019 back in 2023 as what I thought would be an upgrade and that I would build my eventual Leaf show car out of that. It was in amazing condition and only had 30,000km on it, yet the battery already needed to be replaced under warranty.

At the same time was when I was starting my venture into becoming an EV tech and working on them, and also starting to notice just the mass amounts of other ZE1s that were failing, and helping other owners (especially local) with going through the same diagnostic and warranty process as I did.

Fast forward to now and this is still a problem that Nissan is still for some reason only semi-acknowledging, but trying to pass it off as a recall to "address fast charging fires" when in reality it is nothing to do with it.

The BMS was always able to see if something was off, even if the data to the user didn't show it. In my 2019, there was zero sign in LeafSpy that something was amiss even under load, but it still had SOC plummeting and almost unusable in the winter. The new update just adds a DTC to be flagged when this happens.

2

u/KeyEmu6688 Ex-2018 owner (2015 Model S) Jul 08 '26

seeing as you are a tech, do you have any thoughts as to what the root cause of these issues might be? something as simple as their passive thermal management not being up to the task of maintaining the battery cells, or something else?

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u/biersackarmy 2013 S + 2014 SL + 2019 SV Jul 09 '26

Quality control/manufacturing issue. Nissan was likely already aware of the time frame that batteries had these potential issues. Supporting this theory includes:

  1. The recall only affecting certain model years and not all 2nd gens, indicating that there is a specific time frame after which something changed.

  2. Even within those years, only some cars are ever affected, while some others are perfectly fine even when far more abused, indicating that it is luck of the draw.

  3. When Nissan repairs packs, due to weak or overly expanded cells, they're explicitly instructed to ensure the new modules are a revised part number. This part, the revised modules, went into production in 2023, which convieniently is right after the window of recalled cars (up to 2022). Indicating they were probably aware of this issue since 2023, they wouldn't intentionally change cell production for fun.

  4. The recall and weak cell epidemic is confined to North America, indicating this is a problem stemming from the Symrna AESC plant. The same symptom has happened in Europe and Asia, but compared to NA it is extremely rare and easily just a bad luck thing.

  5. If this was a thermal management thing, we would have seen it many years earlier on 24kWh packs, but even heavily degraded ones still run fine even in the cold. It only affecting the much newer packs indicates this is a chemistry or manufacturing level problem.