His electric vehicle battery died. 1 year later still no replacement part | Hacker News Reader

His electric vehicle battery died. 1 year later still no replacement part

cbc.ca

24 pointsIronWolve14 comments

"While the replacement falls under the warranty covering 160,000 km or eight years"

This is probably the key part of the article, that it's for a warranty-install replacement. There's seemingly a cottage aftermarket for fixing & replacing leaf batteries if doing it out of warranty.

There's a service center that does battery replacements and repair a couple of miles from my house (suburb northwest of Houston)

https://evridesllc.com/ is in Oregon and offers replacements and upgrades. My mom bought a used leaf from them with a 75 mile range and she's been pretty happy with it.

To be fair, that waiting game has happened in the general auto industry before. But this is something that shows a novel risk that can and will definitely change buyer's minds for the whole industry.

Ho hum. Mr. Early Adopter learns what happens to early adopters.

This is a Nissan Leaf. Those have been around for what, a decade? Not exactly an early adopter IMO.

The car had been in production for 6 years when he bought his. I wouldn’t call that an early adopter. This is Nissan not making enough replacement parts because they didn’t want to foot the bill.

Be nice to see a "parts rating" for cars, how easy it would be to get replacement parts. Also common accidents like quarter panels, swing arms, etc.

Common accidents like rear/corner end accident repairs that should cost a few grand costing tens of thousands.

How can a person say this? Do you not buy products in your life? Of course yes, and this is not a small, new, Kickstarter company.

If you live in North America, you can buy an “EV” or you can buy a Tesla. And if you buy a Tesla, you probably won’t have any of the issues with “EVs” that journalists love to write about.

If you won’t buy a Tesla, there’s no point in buying until 2025 when all the manufacturers roll out NACS. 2025/2026 is going to be essentially a “soft reset” for the whole US EV market.

Where to start?

First of all, there’s another article on HN today about how teslas wheels fall off, and (in other cars) the suspension collapses (in one case with 115 miles on the odometer).

The point of the article isn’t that the cars have problems though. The issue is that it is official company policy to blame the customer and refuse to honor the warranty. (The 115 mile suspension failure case’s owner paid out of pocket to replace the suspension, then immediately sold it).

Second, I have a Ram pickup that’s one year older than this leaf. I can’t even get oem brake components for it anymore.

Third, generalizing from early Leafs to the rest of the industry is laughable. They were the only major manufacturer that shipped without active battery management, which was a disaster. There are a ton of old leafs with dead batteries, and plenty of people trying to repair and flip them (or get a deal), so it is unsurprising that nissan is out of obsolete replacement parts.

Slightly newer nissans and pretty much every other brand will have much better battery life, so there’s no real environmental or economic reason to repair the old ones (unless you replace the power train…)

In fact, this car is new enough, that if sold today and eligible for the federal EV rebate in the US, they would have to replace the battery for free. No one is selling cars like this old leaf in the US today.

"...so there's no real environmental or economic reason to repair the old ones"

The environmental benefit to EVs with long service lives is substantial vs. crushing one in a landfill six years after it rolls off the line. Manufacturers ought to aim for repairability and maintain supply of parts, especially if they are pursuing an eco business strategy.

Any “eco business” strategy is mere greenwashing of their real strategy: keep making money however they can. Not one manufacturer gives two shits about the environment, beyond how it directly impacts their bottom line. All EVs to date are a farce at being good for the environment by nearly any metric.

If you charge at home like many EV owners, the NACS change isn't that big of an event. Otherwise it'll just mean getting an adapter, and it's unlikely that stations like Electrify America, EVGo, etc, are going to be ripping out all of their CCS2 plugs overnight.

The bigger issue will be the gnashing of teeth by Tesla owners when Superchargers are taken up Kias and Fords.

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