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Nissan says Leaf batteries will outlast the car by 10-12 years
- adrianN 7y agoNice. We'll need a lot of batteries for the transition to renewable energy.
- Abishek_Muthian 7y agoSuper. I hope all manufactures go back to building products for longevity instead of planned obsolescence, for the sake of the planet.
- lostgame 7y agoHere's looking at you, Apple. I will never buy another MacBook again until upgrading it is an option. Soldered RAM and especially a soldered hard drive are inexcusable, personally, much less the repair ability factor.
- ianai 7y agoI’m more peeved about the soldered batteries. They still expand!
- Animats 7y agoI’m more peeved about the soldered batteries. They still expand! 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?
- codazoda 7y agoI think it's charge percentage. My Kia Niro seems to keep the battery between 50 and 80 percent charged. I've heard that the Tesla does similar (perhaps showing full when it's really 80%). This seems to be the sweet spot for these batteries and smart charging controllers can keep them alive longer. Our phones are under powered though, so the batteries are stretched to their limits and therefore don't last as long.
- ianai 7y agoActually my work laptop is expanding because of its battery. It’s had some usage but nothing like a phone. It’s usage isn’t far from what you describe but with considerable time kept powered. 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.
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- jfoutz 7y agoI don’t really have much of a problem with that, but I would love the option to replace the guts of my mbp every few years. I keep waiting for Gibson’s sandbenders to show up.
- vbezhenar 7y agoYep. CPU's are barely increasing their performance (aside of increasing core count recently, but that's for very specific workloads). Motherboards is basically about CPU. Replace battery, optionally upgrade memory and SSD, replace broken components (WiFi card, keyboard) and it's as good as new. But that requires modular design.
- asteli 7y agoApple are making a series of design trade offs. What portion of laptop buyers will be swayed by the ability to swap their RAM out? Will they sell more units by designing for interchangeable RAM or by being able to make their unit 2mm thinner or add battery life because they saved 6 cm^3 by cutting a mechanical RAM socket with a minimum height of 3mm and the associated volume eaten up by the RAM module?
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoThe trend toward increasingly highly integrated components is not reversing any time soon. You might as well be waiting for horse buggies to come back in fashion.
- api 7y agoI've predicted for a while that we will soon see phone and even PC SOCs where the machine is one chip.
- CamperBob2 7y agoThe system board is the component. You might as well complain that the whole hard drive has to be replaced when the controller board fails, or that an entire DIMM has to be replaced when a single IC fails. 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.
- gingabriska 7y agoBut hacker news was cheering about Apple buying Tesla. So I guess that won't happen as is the case with current MBP
- joosters 7y agoAre these lithium ion batteries or lead ones?
- wlesieutre 7y agoDefinitely lithium ion. Lead acid batteries are about the poorest option in terms of energy capacity per weight, which is important when you have to spend energy for hauling its own weight around. They may be useful for permanent utility grid installations, but you won’t see lead acid batteries powering electric cars.
- adrianN 7y agoI think lead-acid is not useful for grid installations because of the low lifetime. They're good for maybe 300 cycles. Their only redeeming quality seems to be their low cost.
- wlesieutre 7y agoAh you’re right. Looks like they’re used for small scale off grid solar installations, not so much at utility scale. It’s been done (link below) but even the one I found is moved over to lithium ion now. https://energy.ehawaii.gov/epd/public/energy-project-details.html?rid=3--1750332b5038042 https://energy.ehawaii.gov/epd/public/energy-project-details...
- joosters 7y agoToyota uses lead batteries in the Prius, they’ve been fine there for over a decade. Obviously much heavier than Li, but that’s a price/weight trade-off. With suitable charge management, lead acid batteries can last a very long time.
- emp 7y agoIs 10 years normal for the lifespan of a car? Mine is 23 now, still works fine, and I feel is nicer than similar new cars in terms of interior finishes, hydraulic power steering, actual buttons for climate control that do their one thing well. 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?
- bertil 7y agoBoth car parts and battery longevity depend on how you use them more than how long — so those statements are about overall statics; there will always be anecdotes. 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.
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoTrying to look up statistics on this, and what I find is very strange: 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?
- random314 7y agoIt might seem like the average age should be 7.5 years but cars that last longer than 15 years will contribute more to the sample than the average car, thus giving an average of 11.
- Zenst 7y agoA few ways when you use averages and only use one type of average - mean average without including mode or median average types. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
- jmpman 7y agoHow do their batteries last in Phoenix? Air cooled is unlikely to work well.
- CalChris 7y agoPhoenix is bad for lead acid and lithium batteries.
- nobleach 7y agoSeeing how many 2013 Altimas are just blowing up transmissions, Nissan/Renault appear to be estimating the lifespan of one of their automobiles as 5 years. I'm glad they've got their eye on long-lasting batteries, but, maybe build a car that can last as long as those batteries?
- jordanbeiber 7y agoWell, I think that EV is the way to go here. Few moving parts in one of those which should in the end gain us consumers, but who knows. They’ll find new ways to squeeze us! An ICE is really a very complex piece of machinery. Lots of $ plowed down to get them where we are today.
- thebruce87m 7y agoThe data I’ve seen for Nissan looks terrible, enough to put me off until the do some active battery conditioning like other manufacturers. https://pushevs.com/2018/03/20/nissan-leaf-battery-degradation-data-24-vs-30-kwh-batteries/ https://pushevs.com/2018/03/20/nissan-leaf-battery-degradati...
- codazoda 7y agoThe average life of a car is only 10 years? Wow. I tend to use my vehicles much longer than that and I don't spend a lot on repairs. 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).
- api 7y agoIt depends a lot on where you live. Cold climates with salt and ice destroy cars. Loads of rain can do it too. Where I live in SoCal cars last absolutely forever. You see people driving early 90s Hondas all the time and they've just gradually fixed stuff. The body is worn but basically good after almost 30 years. I imagine here a Leaf could outlast its batteries, but maybe not in Michigan or New York. 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.
- newnewpdro 7y agoYep, I drive a reliable but beat up ~300k-mi 90s car in CA and whenever I visit family in the west chicago suburbs by car I get viewed as white trash driving such a piece of crap and constantly checked out by city police. The salt destruction completely redefines what it means to operate such an old car there. The prevailing attitude is that only ghetto poor people drive old beat up cars because they can't get a loan for a new one, presuming everyone needs to replace their car often. 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.
- Scoundreller 7y agoA lot. I’m in the salt belt and can’t believe how some identical cars look when I watch a YouTube repair video for a car from S. USA or Australia.
- aristophenes 7y agoTo say that this article is misleading is not enough. This article appears to be deliberately deceptive. Nissan Leafs are specifically known to have battery problems such that they lose a large percentage of their storage after a few years. The reason the batteries need to be recycled for other uses is because they keep having to be replaced, and they need to do something with the old batteries that are no longer useful for cars. Sure the battery might outlive the car, doing something else. Meanwhile, the car will need several battery replacements. See https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/29/nissans-long-strange-trip-with-leaf-batteries/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/29/nissans-long-strange-tr...
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- jordanbeiber 7y agoThey (nissan) guarantee 75% capacity after 8 years or 160.000 km.
- twblalock 7y agoReasons to lease an electric car rather than buy: the batteries degrade over time, and even if they did not people would believe they did. 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.
- CalChris 7y agoI’d have kept my Leaf if I could have upgraded the battery pack when it came time to replace it.
- userbinator 7y agoWhen I read the title, I could imagine someone at Nissan thinking "the battery is 10-12 years too reliable, can we make it cheaper so it doesn't outlast the rest of the car?" 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.
- aristophenes 7y agoThey already did that. Their battery does not have a thermal management system like their competitors do, and so it gets damaged during heavy use or temperature fluctuations. It loses capacity rapidly and must be replaced after 5 years or so if the owner would like to keep a reasonable driving range. Therefore they need to figure out what to do with these bad battery packs, and as the article states they can use it to power street lights as it won't work for the car anymore. I'd recommend searching for other articles about the Nissan Leaf battery to get a better understanding of the situation.
- Scoundreller 7y agoOr for somebody to figure out how to add a mitigating thermal management system? Or was this a cost decision that can’t be explained by incompetence?
- jordanbeiber 7y agoI got a leaf 6 months ago. 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.
- Scoundreller 7y agoMeanwhile in France, a company or two are selling electric cars where you rent the battery, and it’s on the manufacturer to replace it if/when it degrades beyond a pre-defines threshold.