I Bought A $2000 Electric Car With A Failing Battery. Here’s How Bad It Is

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It’s 2023 and gas prices are getting out of hand, especially in California. “That’s fine, I’ll just snag a cheap used EV,” you think to yourself as you crack open Facebook Marketplace. “Hey, this 2011 Nissan Leaf is only $2000; what a deal!” you think as you slam your laptop shut and rush to the bank before someone can steal this smokin’ bargain from under you. Fast forward a few hours and you’re driving home in your shiny (ish), new (ish), only-moderately-dented electric car only to realize: You might not actually make it back. This is the state of used electric cars in the U.S. in 2023: The very bottom of the market doesn’t just suck, it is filled with some of the most useless vehicles in all of automotive history, as I discovered first-hand with the dirt-cheap Nissan Leaf I bought this past weekend. Here, let me explain.

If you’ve got two grand in your pocket and need some wheels, you’ve got options. Yes, even in 2023. Snag an older, high-mileage gasoline-powered vehicle with a stickshift and with a bit of cosmetic damage, and you’ll have reasonably reliable transport for under the $2G mark. I’ve done this numerous times.

But if you want a working EV for $2000, and you don’t qualify for any incentives (EV incentives are bringing decent used EVs like my BMW i3 closer and closer to within reach for those shopping at the very bottom of the market), your options are slim. Autotrader compiled a list last year of the cheapest used EVs on its site, and the top three were:

  1. 2012 Nissan Leaf
  2. 2012 Mitsubishi i-MiEV
  3. 2012 Ford Focus Electric

Note that this list excludes vehicles with malfunctioning batteries; so what if you buy the already-cheapest EV, but with a battery whose health is severely compromised? Well, you get a very, very cheap machine. Like, $2000 cheap. That is, by far, the least expensive functioning 2011 Nissan I’ve find near me. In fact, around LA, the very cheapest Nissan in 2011, the Versa, costs at least double what a used Leaf costs (the $2,700 one below needs a new transmission). That’s because a decently maintained gasoline car, even with 200,000 miles on the clock, is a much, much more usable machine than an early Leaf with even just half as many miles.

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The Leaf I bought has under 70,000 miles on it, and is actually in fantastic shape other than the driver’s side fender, which, while parked on the side of the street, received a bit of percussion from a rogue driver (not a Nissan Rogue, but those are so common that it might have been).

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The interior is lovely, actually, and comes equipped with navigation! The sounds the car makes when you start it up, the fun screens and lighting — it makes for a rather futuristic experience. The car feels special when you get behind the wheel:

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Take the shifter; sure, it’s a bit odd, requiring you to pull a little spring-loaded ball to the left and down for drive and to the left and up for reverse. For park, you just hit the button on top. It’s a little odd, but it’s at least different, and adds to the vehicle’s unique vibe.

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The Leaf’s backup camera is a little antiquated, and so is the nav, but honestly, the fact that this 2011 car even has those features is awesome. And that little button on the top left of the steering wheel that immediately brings up charging stations on the navigation screen? Genius!

Plus, the interior is legitimately comfortable, with a ride quality that’s surprisingly supple, especially compared to that of my i3. Sadly, I didn’t have much time to appreciate the Leaf’s ride since I was afraid I might not actually make it home.

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After dishing out 20 Benjamins and taking ownership of the title (and also planning an off-road trip, since Celso, the Leaf’s seller, has a TJ and goes to the same off-road park that I frequent), I left the kind man’s house almost immediately regretting my purchase (I say “almost,” because I knew I was buying a basket case. Even if not quite this bad). It became clear right away that the over-30 miles of estimated range stated on the Guess-O-Meter were just not going to happen. Thirty kilometers maybe!

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You’ll note that on the right side of the gauge cluster are five bars, two of them red. These are the battery health indicator bars, and you can find various tables around the internet describing how many bars correlate to how much remaining battery capacity. As this table from electricvehiclewiki.com shows, my Leaf’s battery capacity is probably somewhere around 45 percent. That should give me about 35 miles of range (range when new was an EPA-estimated 73 miles), and yet, no matter how gingerly I drove my Leaf from Celso’s house to mine, it seemed like I was going to maybe — MAYBE — get 25 miles. I do need to inflate the tires a bit, so that should help with range, but it probably won’t make a giant difference. I think 45 percent is optimistic, and that’s just sad.

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Here’s a look at that first drive home:

 

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I made it back, but with only five miles of estimated range left, which probably translates to about three miles of actual range. I put the car on a charge and topped the battery up; it only took about 6.5 kWh, which is a little alarming given that this is a 24 kWh battery.

Nissan Leaf 2000
Photo: Facebook seller

In any case, with a battery topped up, I decided another test was in order: I planned a drive from Studio City, California to Santa Monica — a 17 mile drive normally, though I decided to take the scenic, shorter route through Bel Air, even if it took more time. This would cut off four miles.

Nissan Leaf2002
Photo: Facebook seller

Unfortunately, as you can see in the video towards the top of this article, road closures pushed the trip closer to 20 miles, and — worried that I’d get stranded with a dead battery between my house and Santa Monica — I bailed. Yes, all it takes to ruin a simple 13-mile trip in this 2011 Nissan Leaf is a few road closures.

 

2011 Nissan Leaf 16 Source 2011 Nissan Leaf 15 Source 2011 Nissan Leaf 14 Source

You can see some photos of the Leaf’s battery pack above, along with its drive-unit (it’s all under the hood; the Leaf is front-wheel drive). If you really want to get into the weeds of this pack, Weber State University’s EV-guru, John D. Kelly gets in deep:

To Nissan’s credit, the Leaf was early to the EV game, and you can argue that it was America’s first truly high-volume lithium-ion battery-equipped electric car. It also saw a number of battery-related improvements over the years. Still, when it launched for the 2011 model year with an air-cooled battery pack, the Leaf was pretty much doomed to a short life. Those 48 modules of pouch cells, which together give the vehicle 24 kWh of capacity when new, just aren’t managed properly to allow them to live beyond about 10 years, 100,000 miles without significant degradation. Check out Nissan Leaf owners forums, and you’ll see: Nissan Leafs, especially the first few model-years, are almost all down to about 30 to 40 miles of remaining range.

The result is that they are the very cheapest “functional” electric car you can buy. The question is: Should you?

Nissan Leaf2003
Photo: Facebook seller

My first couple of tests tell me that the answer is “no” unless you live within about eight miles from work. In that case, it might be nice to drive an EV that likely won’t require as much maintenance as a gasoline vehicle, which — especially in the cold — doesn’t take kindly to short trips, anyway.

For the majority of people, though, the Nissan Leaf is a paperweight, largely useless unless you plan on tearing the thing apart to learn more about EVs and to use the parts in an EV conversion. That’s what I’m doing.

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181 thoughts on “I Bought A $2000 Electric Car With A Failing Battery. Here’s How Bad It Is

  1. If I had the extra money (and needed to reduce the miles on my Sportwagen, which I don’t because I work from home) something like that would tempt me. But I couldn’t even do my weekly day of around-town errands on a range that limited. Especially because where I live, summer temps are in the upper 80s/90s and it can drop to the 20s/teens in winter, necessitating climate control.

    1. True. Someone could start a business buying up cosmetically decent Leafs (Leaves?) from around the country and reselling them in the Villages (America’s Friendliest Hometown). Work out a way to put some novely grilles on the front, and you might just tempt some retirees out of their GEMs and Club Cars

      1. Well, let’s hope he isn’t planning to storm the beaches of Normandy with it! He’s going to miss Operation Market Garden while waiting for a Supercharger.

      2. That’s what he says the plan is now until his warped CA mind changes the plan. Will prolly end up swapping the Leaf drivetrain into a Moke so he can keep up with traffic on the 5.

  2. I know the primary goal is an EV conversion of some other car, but you could also do a gas conversion on the Leaf.
    It would be interesting what will be possible when 10-15 year old worn-out battery EV rolling chassis will be very common.
    Kubota diesel, or a V-twin harbor freight engine swap? Or something more spicy like small turbo engine from a Smart?

  3. I have a friend with a 1st generation Leaf. The battery was degraded to about 40% capacity when the charger decided to stop working altogether. To get replacement parts from the dealership will cost well more than the car will be worth once it is fixed. It’s a real shame that it is not economical to repair, because there is otherwise a mechanically robust chassis and a drive system with decades of life left in it.

    We’re considering swapping the motor and inverter into another FWD car. If we can find one, a Saab Sonnet would be a good choice, but also considering a 1st gen Honda Insight, a 90s era Honda Civic, a Geo Metro, a Geo Storm, Honda CRX, among other small/lightweight choices with low CdA values.

    Disposable EVs are still the norm to this day. It’s a complete waste of the technology. You can get 7-digit mileage out of an EV drive system, and it should be possible to make an EV that is not only relatively easy to repair, but could also last the buyer an entire lifetime. To build them with planned obsolescence in mind(lasting just long enough to exceed the warranty terms), and then locking everything behind proprietary tools/software, is a total waste of all of the embodied resources that went into building the car and its components. EVs should be simple things that are repairable with basic tools, not smartphones on wheels.

    1. Spoiler Alert: Back in My Day Rant
      As a society, it seems like we’ve gone to disposable everything. Why pay for parts or a repair when you can get something new for twice the price? I’m going through that with my kid right now. His car needs about a $2000 repair to make it run like decent car. The car itself isn’t really worth that much money, but he wants to dump it and buy a used car in the $6000 range from private owners online even though he doesn’t know what problems they might have. I try to explain that the value of the car doesn’t really matter unless you are selling it. a $2000 repair is still less than a $6000 used car.

      1. tried this with some very fiscally smart friends earlier this year. The engine in their otherwise fine SUV died, I told them even at the excessively high cost of repair it was still a better financial move to replace that engine than it was to buy a new car. They couldn’t get past the “value” of the thing and dumped it as a trade for a brand new car. It’s baked into our DNA at this point and is very hard to fight against.

        1. That depends on need and availability. I wanted to replace the engine in my Focus ST as that was the car was otherwise really good, but of the dozen or so places contacted, only one was willing to do the job and told me it would be a “rainy day” project I would bet would put it out at least a year if it ever got done at all. That’s a no go even if it wasn’t my only car. In my younger days, I would have done it myself, but I’m not broke and I sold off my cranes and stands and such.

          1. That’s a fair addition to the formula, and while they have a second car, it has also been having similar near end of life issue so that was probably a big factor; along with their family needs.

            1. Yeah, the psychological factor isn’t unimportant, either—sometimes you just grow tired or even get to hate a car and, like any bad relationship, it’s worth whatever it takes to get the hell out of it.

      2. I think that’s generally true, but it all depends on the vehicle and its history. Is that $2k the latest of a string of problems and/or have more looming on the horizon? Does the car have the stink of end of life? I think in your case, assuming that isn’t the case, I agree the $6k new-to-him car is a bad idea as that’s the low end today and is just as likely to require $2k or more in repairs in short order.

        1. Common wisdom is that payments on a dirt cheap new car come out ahead of monthly repair bills on a shitbox. Of course that assumes someone has the privilege of credit and steady income.

          1. Exactly. That’s where I’ve been for almost 20 years, buying new cars. I drive a lot for work, which makes used cars a potential huge PITA that might not save me much money in the long run, anyway. For the people without that luxury, though, it’s difficult to pull out of that hole and it’s only gotten much worse since the bottom of the market was gutted in 2008 with CfC raising the floor for used cars, then millions of new cars not being built during the recession for a few years to leave a hole in the later used car market, then came the pandemic shortages taking out millions more, and the endangered state of the cheap car market reducing it further and raising all prices. If you’re looking at a toilet car with repairs costing an average of $300/month—nearly a new or a good used car payment, except that’s not an option for someone who lacks the credit and/or money to cover the difference in coverage on a used car loan—and all you can do is barely stay afloat with that, how do you stretch to the lower end of the decent used car market of around $13k—and that’s still probably mainly made up of cars about 12 years old with over 100k miles—because anything less than that is another crap shoot that likely just kicks the toilet down the road another year or two if it isn’t just as bad? As the saying goes: it’s expensive to be poor.

          2. Common wisdom is that payments on a dirt cheap new car come out ahead of monthly repair bills on a shitbox”

            That ‘wisdom’ is mostly wrong

            Sure you save a bit of money on repairs when you buy new. But on my Fit (which I bought 4.5 years ago for CAD$4000 plus tax), the cost of repairs works out to less than CAD$100/month… meanwhile even the cheapest new car cost at least CAD$400/month. Plus insurance typically costs more on a new car compared to an old/cheap beater.

            So it depends on which “dirt cheap” new car you are talking about and what ‘shit box’ you are comparing it to.

            The only time a new car is cheaper is if you’re going from an old/unreliable BMW/Audi/Mercedes to a new Mirage/Corolla/Civic or similar cheap/reliable/basic Japanese car.

    1. Until manufacturers make the batteries for PHEV’s easily and affordably replaceable, it’s not really any better from a longevity standpoint than a full EV. Most PHEV’s still don’t work right if the battery isn’t healthy. I still ditched my Volt before the 8 year warranty was up. I’ll probably ditch my current PHEV around the same time unless there’s a decent battery replacement plan from the manufacturer or an aftermarket supplier.

      The Leaf is worse than most because the thermal management of the battery is pretty poor so there is a lot of degradation.

      For someone with limited budget, an old EV or PHEV is probably a bad choice.

      1. I guess I always assumed they would just switch over to gas sooner. Interesting. So, it ends up the same as an EV. A better solution to battery replacement.

        1. To a point, it will just switch to gas sooner, but with something like a Volt, there really isn’t much degradation because the thermal management is so good, and the upper and lower battery buffers (the portion of the battery you can’t use) are so conservative. The problem lies that if just one of the cells (there are 288 in a Gen 1) gets far enough out of balance, or goes “bad”, the car won’t work at all anymore (not on gas or electric) and the only choice is to replace the battery. GM doesn’t make battery sections anymore, so it’s either the whole battery, or a used battery from an aftermarket company. This still seems to be a rarity, but with Volts that are 12 years old now, it is happening.

      2. Some systems work better at protecting the battery. Since you aren’t fully draining or topping it ever and don’t use high current (speed) charging the life *should* be much longer.

        1. It is, and there’s very well engineered EV’s and PHEV’s out there, but I just look at the number of cars over 15 years old that are on the road. I don’t think very many EV’s and PHEV’s are going to make it that long unless they are engineered for easy and cheap replacements of the batteries. Everything else on the car will hold up fine, and I’d even say most of it will hold up better than a gas vehicle, but the battery will take it off the road. My Volt had about 70,000 EV miles on it (and about 6,000 gas miles) when I sold it and there was no battery degradation that I noticed. But I still cringe when I see people buy a used 10-12 year old Volt and take a loan out on it. They have no means to replace a battery and there’s a fairly high chance it’s going to go bad before their loan is paid. Yeah, you have the same risk with a gas vehicle, but those seem to fail more based on miles and maintenance, where EV’s fail more based on age.

          1. Oh for sure! It’s the same realm of people who should by BMWs from the 90s on. I would never tell my sister to buy an old Volt, but I’ve had cheap BMW 00s cars, built my own powerwall, and would use it as a 3rd vehicle. That is who should buy those. A universal standard for battery cells, packs, BMS connections, and cooling couplers would be the best Eco move, but also sounds like what a communist factory would produce (and those rides don’t seem to be coveted today, except by Torch).

  4. What is the cost of installing new batteries including parts and labor? It has to be a lot more than a transmission replacement, right? I remember the Tesla idea they dropped about battery swaps where you got new batteries at a station while leaving yours behind. I think I read somewhere there are companies still working on that technology.

  5. I think when David moved out west they grabbed him up from the airport, gagged and bagged him, drove him out to somewhere so sketch it’s cliche, and then used an old iPad and a broken-down welding robot to give him a back-alley Jeep-ectomy. Like a really weird game of operation where they had to remove the rusty 10mm socket from his chest cavity and replace it with a lithium ion battery…

    1. Don’t worry they will give him a beat down when he shows up in Moab wearing skinny jeans with holes (not sure if he will buy ones with holes already or too cheap and make his own holes), Zegna shoes, and sport coat over a intentionally raggy style t-shirt.

  6. I keep trying to convince my employer to go down this same road and buy me an EV to tear apart to build something cooler. We need someone on staff with a much better technical understanding of EV drivetrains than we currently have. I keep telling them its cheaper to by me a thrashed EV to rip apart than to hire some specialist. My boss keeps telling me they “won’t fund my project car addictions.” Come on Man!

  7. California: the land of cheap off-lease EVs is finally returning to the pre pandemic normal pricing.

    One of my friends bought a Leaf just like this with about 60k miles, 1 year remaining on the 10 year battery warranty, and “1 bar” left before the warranty kicked in. He paid closer to $5k, but got a free replacement battery from Nissan before the warranty expired.

    I am really curious how much effort / cost it is to DIY fix this!

  8. So this is the 1.25 gallon tank car lol please take your time with this project and learn about High Voltage and whatever precautions you have to take, cant wait to read about it. When I see orange cables, nope I am out, dont want to get fried

      1. Sorry, man, left mine in the Philippines 40 years ago. Good luck with the project, sounds interesting. Remember the days when they used to advertise complete WW II Jeeps in their original crates on the back of comic books? Presumably, still slathered in Cosmoline.

        1. I always just thought those were a scam, like the spooky “flying” bat (it’s on a string), or the 1000 toy soldiers packed in a footlocker (it’s made of cardstock).

      2. Just tell me that whatever you find involves a month long thrash to make it barely roadworthy and limp it half way back across the country, only to tear it all back down for the EV conversion!

  9. If you wanted to learn more about EV’s you could of just built an RC car, much cheaper option. Also on the conversion part, sorry but EV guts will not help convert rust back into pretty shiny metal.

  10. When I was between Tesla’s (one got totaled and I was waiting for insurance to get their act together), I looked at cheap Leafs (Leaves?)

    If I was in California, I would have pulled the trigger. There are a few shops in that state that rebuild Leaf battery packs. For under $10k, I could have had an EV with a nearly new battery.

  11. largely useless unless you plan on tearing the thing apart to learn more about EVs and to use the parts in an EV conversion. That’s what I’m doing.

    Whew 🙂

    It will be interesting to see what you can do with the battery pack itself, e.g. replacing individual cells and figuring out how to liquid-cool the unit.

    1. I have a feeling that the important bits for David are going to be the motor, inverter/controller, maybe BMS? The cells themselves probably won’t make the cut, being too degraded. I don’t think the Leaf’s loss of capacity is similar to that seen for older hybrids, where manually balancing the pack and replacing a couple bad cells will bring the rest back to more usable condition – the poor thermal management (both cooling and lack of heating) will cause them all to degrade.

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