- Nissan failed to repair a brand-new Leaf with a failed 40-kilowatt-hour battery.
- The car sat at the dealer for months.
- Eventually, Nissan bought back the car from the owner and offered another, brand-new Leaf.
A failing high-voltage battery on an electric vehicle is usually associated with high repair costs. That’s why some people are terrified that their beloved EV might conk out, leaving them stranded. Even though statistics show that the possibility of an EV battery failing is tiny (as in, less than 3%), the high costs that sometimes go over $10,000 after the warranty ends are a legitimate worry.
But what do you do when a brand-new battery-powered car gets a bad battery? That’s exactly what happened to the base Nissan Leaf owned by our friends at Out of Spec Reviews. They leased a poverty-spec Leaf powered by a 40-kilowatt-hour battery for a shockingly low fee, which was a great content source for new views, but the reality is that the car only covered 430 miles before becoming a huge brick on wheels.
We wrote about this particular Leaf before, but to keep things short, the high-voltage battery had a bad cell group, which made the car undriveable. Seeing how this was a brand-new EV, it went back to the Nissan dealer for repairs, but here’s where things get interesting.
The dealer did the best it could, as far as I can tell from the video embedded below. The necessary parts were ordered in due time, but every time the customer checked in on the progress, the answer was that the parts were on backorder. Several months passed with the car just sitting in the dealer’s parking lot, which isn’t exactly reassuring. Granted, the owner got a loaner vehicle, but judging from the comments on the YouTube video, not everybody got the same treatment–the fact that Out of Spec Reviews has nearly a quarter of a million subscribers likely helped expedite things.
Nissan has eventually stepped up and decided to buy back the broken Leaf and offer a brand-new model. That, however, hasn’t happened to other Leaf owners who experienced the same issue with their EVs, but maybe this video will help them sort things out at last. They’ve been waiting for months to get a replacement part but it’s seemingly on backorder indefinitely.
For what it’s worth, the lease agreement remained the same, only with a new VIN attached. That’s good because the lease price is insanely low: under $20 per month with a $500 down payment. It’s also not so good because the lease agreement is still the original two years, but because the initial car was unusable for a couple of months, the effective usage period of the new EV is slightly shorter.
