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Comment by tway009 | Hacker News Reader

Another problem is the fast pace of innovation.

Tesla aside, most electric vehicles will be outdated in 3-5 years (I say that as an e-Golf owner/lessee) because the next generation of vehicles will be much better. I think we're in the iPhone 3G phase and have a couple iterations/generations of fast evolution ahead until the market stabilizes.

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We own one of the first Nissan Leafs off the line. When we're done with it, I will happily give it to someone (because resale on these is already next to nothing) if it replaces their ICE car. And an old electric is something that I theorize would be perfect for the less wealthy. An old beater ICE has to be more trouble and expense than on old EV with a usable battery. Even if it only goes 40 miles in its old age, at least it will do those 40 miles reliably.

Used EVs will be ideal cars for teens learning to drive - they don't need huge range, and they don't need much maintaining.

The ideal car for a teen learning to drive is the car that their family already owns.

Depends how you look at it. You could make an argument that the ideal is a brand new car with the best crash test scores of anything on the market and state-of-the-art safety features.

Car crashes are the leading cause of death for teenagers: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db37.htm#leadin...

My friend told me the chances of a teenage driver having an accident is close to 100%. Put them in a safe car.

If you let them out unattended with their idiot friends, sure. But that's not exactly 'teaching them how to drive'.

If you are supervising them as they learn to drive, I strongly doubt it.

Put yourself in a safe car while teaching a teenager to drive! :)

I know someone who learned to drive in an older leaf.

In some ways a better experience. The accelerator is drive-by-wire for instance, so acceleration is smooth. The regenerative braking means just lifting your foot slows you down.

One wierd part was the driving test asks about putting the car in "accessory" (which the leaf technically has, but is hard to achieve without studying the manual). Other evs don't even have it.

"accessory" (which the leaf technically has, but is hard to achieve without studying the manual).

I’ll remind our listeners at home that I’m the one with the eight year old Leaf. To this day, with a gun to my head, I couldn’t get it into “accessory” in under five minutes, if at all. From memory, it’s some combination of “this sequence” coupled with “but only if..., otherwise...”. If you master that, try and turn the heat on with it still plugged in, without using the app. It can be done, but...

press the start button without stepping on the brake

Unfortunately it is difficult to KNOW you are in accessory.

There is a tiny battery symbol on the dash and/or the traction motor indicator is off (car symbol with arrows underneath). This is non-obvious and lost in the other indicator lights.

You will eventually find out (like a regular car) because climate control will not change the temperature, but the fans will blow and the 12v battery will drain.

I'm curious, why are do used Leafs have such low resale value?

Guessing because when they were new, the range was marginal for a lot of uses (80ish miles), and uses drop off rapidly with even minor battery losses (when 40 miles each way drops to 25), your circle gets a lot smaller.

Because after eight years, driving from Redmond->Seattle->Redmond with the heat on becomes a dicey proposition. Best keep a list of charging stations handy, that's all I'm sayin'. Used to be that trip was no problem if I kept it under 70mph on the freeway. Now I better keep it closer to 60mph, and leave the heat off if I don't really need it. The next gen used a heat pump and electric seats to keep you warm rather than an inefficient strip heater. (Digressive pet peeve: that heater draws 3K watts while it's warming up. Why the fsck does it take five minutes to produce heat? Where is that 3K watts going other than to warm my legs fifteen seconds after I hit the switch?)

And compared to what you can buy today, even if it's a used-but-later-model Leaf, they're weren't great when they were new. We bought ours because we have an ICE in reserve. Go buy a Chevy Bolt for the same money we spent and most folks can just forgo the ICE with the range the Bolt has. We keep the Leaf around because it suits most of our needs, and I usually get to work on a scooter or bicycle, so the wife can commute in it and the ICE sits. But as the battery degrades, he becomes more of a "running around town" car.

That's crazy, w/r/t the heater. Our 3 starts firing heat immediately. I thought that was a major EV advantage.

The impression I have: The first couple generations of Leafs don't have active battery temperature management and so far most Leafs that have entered the secondary market have done so in part because of large battery capacity reductions (necessitating in some of those cases battery replacements, which so far used dealers haven't been willing to finance at scale, so instead pass the "savings" to the next buyer).

As more Leafs show up with better managed battery lifetimes and/or as more used dealers get comfortable with battery replacements (and that gets subsequently cheaper as an industry), it may be likely that the Leaf loses its reputation as a "loss" on the secondary markets and maybe regains some of its resale value. (Especially now that current generations have more active battery management.)

But the entire secondary market for EVs is overall confused, because there are fewer EVs in the secondary market than should be. (The average first lifetime of an EV is way ahead of ICE "norms" right now, with average EV first owners keeping cars 7-10 years.) It may take used EV sales a while to better readjust prices to the actual marginal utility of a used EV (in light of overall reduced maintenance costs of a secondary EV lifetime versus ICE averages that used dealers have had decades of information about).

After comparing leaf vs tesla I've come to a different opinion. It's not really battery temperature management, I think it's the small battery.

An older tesla with 250 miles range * 2000 cycles would have 500k mile lifetime.

An older leaf, 75 miles range * 2000 cycles = 150k miles lifetime.

Also, charge percentage vs battery health. Telsa recommends keeping the battery between 20 and 80% charge, and charging defaults to 80% (adjustable)

Leafs usually charge to 100% unless you poke around and find the 80% setting.

Note that keeping the leaf between 20 and 80% will give you about 45 miles range (and you need to be a careful driver to get the EPA range).

So - The range will decrease on both cars, but for the leaf, the range will decrease and cycling will increase in an accelerating fashion.

> Leafs usually charge to 100% unless you poke around and find the 80% setting.

Uf. Unless there's internal limiting where 100%=90% that's not a happy thing to do to a pack.

I definitely understand there is a snowball effect in place, but battery research (and as one example, GM's field testing) makes it pretty clear that degeneration occurs much faster when the Lithium-based batteries are used out of operating temperatures, and that appears to be reflected in Leaf used sales (areas prone to more extreme temperature ranges have worse used Leafs).

It's not entirely a fair apples-to-apples comparison, but GM's Volt has generally worse range as comparable Leafs at each early generation, and Volts are showing much less battery degradation when compared. (Certainly you may argue that the range extender of the Volt will bring down cycle counts, but even just comparing electric miles to electric miles the Volt is still outperforming the Leaf on battery degradation.)

As for the 20%/80& thing, that is something that for instance GM's tech actively manages and just bases its outputs as if the ~80% was "full" to avoid consumer confusion. The issue there is not that charge percentage matters, according to battery industry standards, but that individual cells have a "directionality" that should be respected and a discharging cell never used to charge until it has 100% discharged and vice versa. With regenerative breaking it is useful to have cells always available "in the charging direction". It is interesting that GM and Tesla took different approaches in marketing that to car users.

I read the worst degradation was at high temperature combined with high state of charge.

But yeah, don't buy a leaf from dubai or phoenix:

http://www.electricvehiclewiki.com/wiki/battery-capacity-los...

Looking at the volt, it seems to battery thermal management plus it only uses 65% of the battery capacity (similar to the 20%..80% tesla recommendation). I guess they can manage the battery capacity conservatively when there's a gas motor available.

It's an awful, ugly car with an extremely small range. Drives like a golf cart.

You may want to install a second-hand II gen battery instead, because apparently it snaps right in place with only minor modifications:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h47rnjsD0Ys

Thanks for the info. We’re going to have to be deciding what to do with it in the next few years, and that’s an appealing option.

I've heard this echoed by Matt Farah on his One Take review of the Model 3 Performance. He recommended leasing the car as it doesn't seem like a "collectors" item. Essentially saying it was built to be used for a few years, and then recycled. Much like old iPhones are these days.

Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrGgIDqgUj4

I'm not sure how much I agree as the Tesla resale market is very strong (even for old Model S cars). But, definitely curious to see how it shakes out.

We are very much at the tip of the ice berg in terms of EV sales. The car market will look insanely different in 10 years. As a consumer, I'm stoked to see how it plays out.

This is good though. The faster the values of EVs decline, while still having hundreds of thousands of miles of service life ahead of them, the faster they're affordable on the used car market (choking out ICE vehicles) to those of less means.

That doesn't really make sense. It really is a mostly mature product as the components like doors, windows, steering are mostly mature. Cars have been produced for a long time and this is just another marginal improvement on the same concept. Its a car and it gets you to your destination relatively comfortably. Not that much different than other cars.

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