For a long time now, there have been aftermarket specialists offering battery upgrades for the Nissan Leaf. The newer batteries have typically been sourced from crashed Leafs. Naturally, this puts a crimp on the battery supply. Well, now a Chinese company has stepped up the game, and is offering refurbishment packs for your Nissan Leaf (source). For 10k Canadian or so, I can apparently have a 62 kWh pack delivered to my home. Lets review and discuss the economics of doing this.
So for 10k, what problem is it that we are trying to solve? A new 62 kWh battery pack might offer more range, over my 40 kWh pack. Even though the pack has lost only a few percent of its capacity (source). Thus replacing the battery pack is going to give me more range. I would still have to contend with the Leafs quirky Chademo plug (source), and yes, there is no thermal management, which crimps fast charging speeds after 1-2 fast charges. In the end, it is the same car, with more range, up from the 200 ish now to perhaps 300-350 km.
An alternative would be to go shopping. A quick look at autotrader shows I might manage perhaps 10k of trade-in value for my 2018 Nissan Leaf, lets add the 10k for the new pack, and we find ourselves with a 20k budget, for that we can get quite a few Tesla Model 3’s, some old Tesla Model S’s, some Hyundai Kona’s and some Nissan Leaf +. All of those would solve the range problem , and the Teslas or the Konas would come with something else than a Chademo plug to boot.
There are also other considerations, warranty coverage is a major one. If you go shopping, you would have a local dealer to take your grievances to, while the Chinese vendor does offer some warranty on the battery pack, it might be difficult in practice to get anything out of that if something went wrong.
Further, we did not assume there is any value in a pre-owned Nissan Leaf battery back. This may not be the case, you might in fact be able to sell the pack onwards to an EV parts specialist (such as https://ingenext.ca/). At the time of this writing, they had a few for sale on their website for 6-7 k CAD. Well, if I could sell the old pack for 5k, then my 10k bill drops to 5k, which slightly improves the battery replacement project’s prospect.
I am glad there are at least some options out there for new Nissan Leaf batteries, but the economics in my mind are still shaky, also for a little bit more money, you could address other problems too, such as the limited fast charging speed on long freeway road-trips, the limited availability of Chademo etc.
Electric car adventures 