Don't Run Out of Charge in Your Leaf!

Yuo won't get lost, it has built in satnav, and it shows you where the nearest charging stations are if you get caught short.

 

remember 60 is just a number I was asking about, I don't know its real range...

 

hm, i thought that worrying about running out of charge is stupid, but now...

... i just imagined if my car had 4x smaller fuel tank that could fit only 10l... and there was 20x less gas stations in my city.

quite an problem.

 

Sort of, except you start every day with a full charge, and can probably persuade your employer to let you plug in somewhere. For the pioneers it may be problematic (although in an emergency there are probably 100 million or more houses with electrical sockets in the USA), but it won't be long till every mcdonalds, starbucks, movie theater and airport car park has chargers.

 

Re: Oh wow, the flatbeds are coming out

2 incidence are a lot, given the very low numbers of cars shipped. From the descriptions, it sounds like these may have been avoided with a more conservative mileage gauge. I agree with Tom, these things start out with a range that many consider too low to be a reserve on a gas car. For marketing reasons I'm guessing Nissan did not want to start the car with 60 miles reading on a fully charged leaf with a reserve of the other 13 or what ever realistic miles hidden. This is a problem with low range evs, but will hardly stop them from being useful.

There will definitely be people to push them. Your late and you forgot to plug it in. Hopefully the initial sales will go to more conservative drivers. People talk about range anxiety as a problem, but it may help people not get into trouble or mad as we add more evs.

I also see phevs as big part of the electrified market, not just a transition. These can help in emergencies and in hot/cold conditions. EVs make a lot of sense for those that use about half the range, or have another car for the weather or emergency conditions.

 

And it takes a long time to fill it. Also, it's less than 4X smaller. A refilled prius will get an estimated range of ~450 or so (at least mine does). In theory 600 miles, but in reality no. But even if you run that 450 miles you have at least 50 left, so the Prius can very reliably get 500+ miles on a tank. It sounds like the Leaf can reliably not even get 100. I was excited about the Leaf and maybe still am. I think we just need more reports of real-world distances to say. If I could bet the farm on 80 miles on a charge I could probably make one work but if other conditions could bring it a good bit below that I could never make it work.

The volt is expensive, has a poor EV range, and gets weak mileage on premium when running on gas but it definitely has this going for it, people won't get stranded.

Even the ideal Leaf user is frequently going to run fairly low on battery. I imagine that if they got to work and hit a snow storm on the way home and their normally 20 min commute was suddenly an hour or longer with the heat going (or not and their teeth chattering), they'd be nervous about whether they can even make it.

 

can you confirm this, officially?

 

Charge your Leaf - do we know what we are really doing?
There are two issues here. First the driving distance estimates the other is the useful life of the batteries.They both revolve around our understanding, or lack of it, of the behavior of the chemistry used. (The remaining driving distance calculations have a number other variables.)

Some things are bothering me. Does anyone knows how to 'secure' long life of the lithium batteries in cars or is just a guess? Toyota runs the NiMh battery between 20-80% charge. (I only had one occasion when I got two green bars, indicating 100% charge, over almost 3 years of ownership.) There is evidence that in a large number of old Prii(?) the NiMh batteries last a very long time - over 10 years!

My electric RC helicopters use Lithium Polymer (LiPo) batteries. There are not cheap so you want to keep them as long as you can. The manufacturers suggest 'conditioning' a brand new battery to assure maximum useful life. Which means 'almost full discharge' (go figure!) and full charge at least twice before you are free top top-up at your leisure. The manual of my brand new Philips razor recommends the same initial treatment of the battery - I assume NiMh.
So here are at least some of the questions:
1. Does Toyota pre-conditions the batteries in the Prius?
2. Do lithium batteries in cars need 'conditioning'? If so, are they 'conditioned' by the manufacturer?
3. Was Nissan's suggestion to charge the batteries to 80% for maximum battery life based on Toyota's many years of experience with the NiMh batteries? They use different chemistry's. Are the same rules apply or was it a 'just to be safe' suggestion?
4. The suggestion of frequent top-ups to keep your Leaf's battery always fully charged makes a lot of sense. But what is the impact on battery life of frequent charging - top-ups?
5. How do top-ups effect the charge cycle specs of the batteries? 6. What is the exact definition of "charge cycle"? Are top-ups counted? If so how?

There is so much we don't know! There is anecdotal evidence by some Prius owners that the batteries actually 'improve' (hold more juice?) with time - I assume initially.

 

honestly, anyone who purchased a leaf this early in the game should have their wits about them.

 

I'm surprised Nissan released this car in one of the most demanding markets first. Toyota released the first Prius in Japan to iron out any issues or problems BEFORE releasing it to the rest of the world.

Perhaps Nissan are going to regret rushing so much.

 

Toyota uses 40%-80%, and the charge indicator is not scaled to full range. We have very little data on 10 years, as there were some changes in the iconic prius because of suspected problems with the packs. That leaves no data on 10 years for our battery packs. I assume toyota did the calculations well, but we can not know. There were only a small number of prii built before March 2001.

1,2) Preconditioning is needed for memory effects, but you can build nimh and li chemistries without memory effects. I assume the leaf and prius have no memory effect chemistry. They will charge and discharge them to test though.

3) lithiums range of charge is quite different than nimh. Most will last longest stored at about 40% charge. The higher the charge the more degraded they will become over time. Note its not a bad thing to charge to 100% then use the battery, it is a problem for them to sit, especially in the heat for weeks at 100%. They also age poorly if sitting fully discharged.

4) Fast charging and frequent top offs may decrease battery life. Keeping the batteries topped off to the 80% level probably will not effect it much and will ensure that the battery is ready when you are ready to drive.

 

I know from RC batteries also, lipo, that the best longevity is when they are stored at about 50%. I realize The leaf batteries are probably different chemistry--to a degree--but it would not surprise me at all if their optimal life is achieved by sub-capacity charges. Draining a lithium battery below a certain voltage can cause immediate and permanent damage to its capacity. However, there's no doubt at all that the Leaf's electronics kick in preventing this excessive discharge.

 

After GrumpyCabbie educated us on how the TV tax works in England, taxing for a solar roof looks easy in comparison.

 

Thanks. It does sound like a believable piece of advice.

 

Short answer is yes, but exactly what is involved I do not know. In the book about the Prius battery development, the battery company initially had severe problems with lint causing small cell failures and needed to let the batteries age for two weeks to let these defects appear. Toyota went on the warpath to get them to make many manufacturing changes to eliminate those problems. Since then, the present batteries are impressive in quality/testing and fully ready for use when installed.

I do not know what the cell manufacturers do, but I know the auto manufacturers will only accept a fully tested and ready to integrate pack at the assembly stage. All the high end Li-Ion batteries I have designed and tested were ready for full use from the manufacturer (e.g. Panasonic, LG). "Conditioning" appears to me to be a manufacturing step or test stage shifted to the user to make the batteries as cheap as possible and/or safe to transport (e.g. no fire hazard from the stored energy).

Both. Regardless of chemistry, heat is the number one degrader of battery life. Charging efficiency goes down at the end of the charge where the internal resistance increases and the internal heat generated is significant. Ending charging at 80%, while not necessary, is certainly a proven technique for maximizing battery life.

Minimal. As discussed above, its the level that you charge up to that would make more of a difference. Ideally, that is how the car is most effectively used, daily top offs vs fully cycling.

They partially contribute, but its the conditions (e.g. battery internal heating) of the charge that really matter, not the charge starting state.

You would have to see what Nissan uses. A simplistic definition is totaling the energy extracted and charged equaling about half the battery capacity and calling this one charge cycle.

Not my experience. I have a 2001 that had a warranty replacement around 2008. After the replacement, the mpg went up a little less than 2 mpg and stayed steady. Other experts have noted that the internal resistance gets very slightly worse over time. No objective evidence of "improvement" in battery performance. However, often a great improvement in driver performance does occur, which many have commented on.

 

Thanks to you all. Great discussion.

The problems I think are still out there. First, we are not able to be to measure the available energy stored in the battery (level of charge) comparable to the accuracy of the available energy in a fuel tank. Second, the variables effecting the 'draw from this energy bank' are far more complex and therefore quite unpredictable in electric cars.

I think we need a quantum leap in energy storage technology (new battery type), and this may or may not be a battery as we know and define batteries today. This does not diminish the usefulness of today's electric cars if the 'application' fits. I think today's electric cars are where the Motorola's 'brick size' cellphone was in the seventies. 'Brick' to Android - what a ride!

 

From nissan:

Nissan LEAF Electric Car