Above: Photo of the battery fairy, magically restoring the range of a used Nissan Leaf, after extracting it from the Tri-wizard tournament maze.
This and other AI-generated images courtesy of freepic.com.
D’oh!
I’m thinking of buying a 2016 Leaf. That is, I have my eye on one particular used car.
The car looks like a pretty good deal. In particular, the battery received an “excellent” condition rating from Recurrent.com, with a like-new estimated range of well over 100 miles.
Then I thought about that, and zoomed in a bit further …
That’s when I realized what a dunce I had been.
TANSTAAFL
This car has about 67K miles on it. How could the battery be in like-new condition?
Answer: It’s not. As shown above. Based on pictures provided with the used car listing, that I was too dumb to interpret when I breezed across them the first time.
Now that I’ve learned to read the range gauge on a Leaf, I can easily see the following information.
First, the battery has lost perhaps 25% of capacity. When the car was new, the gauge pictured above would have had 12 total bars or segments, in the outside arc. Two red, ten white. As the battery loses capacity, those white segments disappear. The gauge above has nine. I’m not sure exactly where it puts it, but if it falls to eight, within warranty the instructions are to take it to Nissan and get it tested, to see if it needs to be replaced under warranty.
Second, as it was most recently driven, the battery range is about 60 miles. The range gauge — the blue-and-white bars above, the equivalent of the gas gauge — also has twelve segments. At 100% charge, all twelve would be lit. As it stands, four are lit. This car is somewhere around 33% charged, and has 21 miles of range left, at that charge level. There’s a lot of uncertainty in that, and it will reflect the manner in which this car was most recently driven.
That’s a lot more consistent with the mileage on the vehicle. And nowhere near as good a deal as I thought.
This makes the search a lot harder
Now I know that job 1 is to rid my future Leaf of all magical creatures and all magical thinking. Including, unfortunately, whatever magic it is that drives the Recurrent.com battery range estimate.
The upshot is that I can’t trust the Recurrent.com battery rating. Which is a pity, because that was available on the pages of Edmunds.com search results. I could just scroll down the page and read the estimated ranges.
Instead, I have to look at the pictures provided for each used car offered, and hope that one of them provides a clear picture of that gauge.
Examples:
Recurrent range score, 58. By-the-gauge, about 50. Pretty much on the money.
Recurrent range score 70, by the gauge, over 100 miles. Vastly understated. All 12 battery bars remain. The hitch? This car is located in Fresno, CA.
Recurrent range 70 miles, by the gauge roughly 30 miles of range. Vastly overstated. Note that only four battery bars are left.
Conclusion: Recurrent.com range estimate is useless.
That’s enough. Even if the range that appears on the dashboard is a snapshot, and subject to uncertainty based on how the car was most recently driven, it’s better than what Recurrent.com provides. The Recurrent range estimate is so very nearly worthless than the only way to assess Leafs on-line is to hunt down a view of the dashboard, among the photos of the used car that are posted, and check that gauge before proceeding.
Well, surprise. There’s no such thing as magic (below). Here’s the data above, graphed. On average, for the cars that are being put up for sale (so, a self-selected lot of vehicles), you can expect to see about a 4% loss of range for every 10,000 miles that the vehicle has been driven.
That’s a lot more than I would have expected, based on some background reading on range loss. Back in the day, the saying was that when you bough a used car, you bought somebody else’s troubles. Maybe that remains true today.
So, I’m still working on it. Now that I’m paying attention to a more reality-based range estimate, I should expect to get around 50 miles of range, for my roughly $10K-asking price used Leaf.
These looked a lot better when I was still fooling myself. I might have to rethink the whole thing.
