The Case Of The Missing Bars: Nissan Buys Back Leafs, Lawyers Sue

by Bertel Schmitt

Published: September 28th, 2012

Nissan bought back two Leafs from Arizona customers who complained about deteriorating batteries. Automotive News [sub] thinks “this could mollify a small group of Leaf owners and green-car enthusiasts.” However, it does not look like it.

At MyNissanLeaf.com, the discussion meanwhile fills 400 pages and more than 4,000 posts. Hybridcars reports that a small group of vocal Nissan Leaf owners and erstwhile enthusiasts feel they were “not being treated with forthrightness in their attempts to have Nissan concede their batteries were prematurely degraded due to heat.”

Originally willing to help Nissan improve the car, the spurned Leaf-lovers turn into enemies and Volt buyers. Said one forum poster:

“[Forum member] Tony has been one of the strongest supporters of the LEAF and it is troubling to see the transformation in recent months. I should say that this is troubling for Nissan and its fledgling EV enterprise because clearly, unlike GM (maybe it’s really learned from the EV1 fallout), Nissan has not shown appropriate support for it’s early adopters! “

While Leaf owners in Arizona are appalled by Nissan not admitting defects, car executives show more sympathy: “This is early stage technology, and problems arising in a concatenation of circumstances are common,” said an executive of a German car company with extensive American experience. “But if you have ever been the target of a NHTSA probe, or, worse, of a class action suit, and were hounded by a pack of rabid lawyers, you learned to shut up until you know exactly what the problem is, and probably even longer .”

Not surprisingly, a class action suit has been filed on September 24 “on behalf of a proposed Class of all California and Arizona consumers who purchased or leased any 2011 through 2012 Nissan Leaf vehicle.”

Bertel Schmitt

Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.

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8 of 48 comments

Mistrernee on Sep 29, 2012

What will make EV's work: -Low temp/safe molten salt batteries (they're working on it) -standard swappable cells -service stations that heat/charge the batteries and exchange/swap them into a car in a few minutes One downside is that the car would probably need to be plugged in most of the time when it isn't running, especially in colder climates. Anything less than the above is just begging for disappointment. It's entirely possible to do but requires a massive investment up front and until petrol is 3 dollars a litre no private company will bother. If we want to reduce our dependence on oil it's going to take a MASSIVE government investment/intervention. I think it's a bit late and we are past the point of no return.. The time to do something about climate change was way back when Carter was in office. Everyone could commute to work in a screaming jimmy nowadays and the end result would be the same. I'm a bit of a pessimist though.

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- Dr. Kenneth Noisewater on Sep 30, 2012
  
  Personally, I lean towards thorium LFTRs generating power, desalinized water and synthetic motor fuels from distilled atmospheric CO2, as well as valuable medically-useful isotopes and other stable byproducts such as xenon. Given the inherent superiority of electric powertrains (except of course for the battery) having an efficient hydrocarbon genset of some kind on board that can get 50-80% efficiency running at a constant rate coupled with a buffer battery is what I think the best bet for improving efficiency is. The Volt genset is an off-the-shelf hack, but a Volt 3.0 with an efficient turbine or SOFC that can extract more electricity out of a gallon of gas/CNG/diesel would likely get mileage on gas to the 60s and above for a mid-size car with all mod cons and 0-60 in the 6-7s range.
  
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- NMGOM on Sep 30, 2012
  
  @Dr. Kenneth Noisewater Dr. Ken.... As you may know, I had earlier posted 16 reasons why pure EV's are ....well, just wrong, at the present time. And I personally really prefer that as we deplete petroleum, we migrate to CNG usage, on the way to the hydrogen economy**, after which we can forget all about the EV thing. But considering your comments, I always wondered about why electricity can't simply be stored in thousands (millions?) of micro-capacitors, housed in various locations around a vehicle. A capacitor can be "indefinitely" charged and discharged, from 0% to 100 %, without damage. And high or low temperatures don't seem to bother regular capacitors as much as they bother batteries. And, of course, capacitors can charge up virtually "instantaneously" by comparison. Further, historically, capacitors have been made from relatively cheap materials. But is there a capacitor problem with charge leakage, or moisture, or voltage, or degradation, -- that I don't know about? What do you think? ** allowing both H2 fuel-cell cars for shopping; and H2/ICE cars for fun at the racetrack -- best of all worlds. --------------
  
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- PenguinBoy on Sep 30, 2012
  
  @NMGOM It isn't currently practical to store anywhere near enough energy in capacitors to move an EV any useful distance.
  
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- NMGOM on Sep 30, 2012
  
  @Dr. Kenneth Noisewater PenguinBoy... Thank you for the response. You are, of course, referring to "energy density" (ED) of conventional capacitors vs batteries. Currently, even the best "super-capacitors" seem to have only about 1/25th the ED of batteries. But modern nano-technology "ultra-capacitors" seem to be game-changers, and now have ED's approaching those of batteries (not quite there yet). The link below describes a capacitor-run, race-car from Toyota, the Supra HV-R: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-dark-horse-in-race-to Honda has recently patented new capacitor packs that rival batteries, at least as an augmentation to fuel cells, but nothing apparent now prevents their use in ICE-hybrids as well: http://world.honda.com/FuelCell/FCX/ultracapacitor/ Business weeks reports progress at MIT that suggests a no-battery future for EV's eventually: http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-06-27/for-cars-of-the-future-will-batteries-be-required And Fox News shows that Mazda is developing a capacitor-powered EV, using its "i-ELOOP" system: http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2011/11/28/mazda-introducing-capacitor-powered-cars/ So, it appears that some progress is being made with capacitors as power-units for vehicles. But my question was if there were non-ED related issues that are simply not obvious at this stage, or are we "home free" using capacitors for EV's in ways that batteries never could handle? ----------------
  
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- Nikita on Oct 01, 2012
  
  -standard swappable cells -service stations that heat/charge the batteries and exchange/swap them into a car in a few minutes The industry cant even come up with a common charge connector. Battery technology will continue to advance and differentiate one EV from another. This has been mentioned before as a solution to slow charge times and it just wont work.
  
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SCE to AUX on Oct 01, 2012

Heaven help me; I just bought a Leaf this past Saturday (lease, actually). The Nissan discount plus PA state and US subsidies make it very attractively prices. My excellent xB1 is history - traded for the Leaf. And I'm not even a tree-hugger. I'm not a fan of subsidies, but if the money's on the table, I'm taking it.

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- BrianL on Oct 01, 2012
  
  Let us know what you think of it come winter time. Should be fine in the summer.
  
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