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I wonder if the Nissan Leaf is fairly reliable because it was one of the first mass market EVs ever so they have been building them for almost 10 years. Our 201
by api 4y ago
I wonder if the Nissan Leaf is fairly reliable because it was one of the first mass market EVs ever so they have been building them for almost 10 years. Our 2013 is fine but we bought it used so we'd already passed the descent part of the bath tub failure curve on it. I do dimly recall issues with early Leaf cars, mostly with the battery.
The other factor might be that it's basically a Nissan Versa with an EV drive train. The majority of the car is not different from their other cars, which I consider a feature because almost everything but the EV drive train uses standard parts and can be fixed by any mechanic. It basically just has a battery where the gas tank is and a motor that pretends to be an engine to the other hardware in the vehicle. (I read somewhere that this is almost literally true if you dip into its CANbus traffic.)
It's also a little bit hackable:
https://github.com/dalathegreat/leaf_can_bus_messages https://github.com/dalathegreat/leaf_can_bus_messages
I haven't done anything but I have a friend who's really into car hacking. Have chatted with him about maybe doing a side business upgrading these from CHADEMO to CCS. There are projects for doing that on GitHub with parts lists and code.