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:
- 2012 Nissan Leaf
- 2012 Mitsubishi i-MiEV
- 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.
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).
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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
Here’s a look at that first drive home:
View this post on Instagram
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
- Man Buys Broken ‘Mechanic’s Special’ BMW i3 For Dirt Cheap. Fixes It In Front Of The Seller In 3 Minutes And Drives Off
- Man Buys Broken ‘Mechanic’s Special’ BMW i3 For Dirt Cheap. Fixes It In Front Of The Seller In 3 Minutes And Drives Off
- I Bought A High-Mileage Electric Car With A Bad Battery. Here’s Why That Was Actually A Stroke of Genius
- My BMW i3 Depreciated $43,000 In Just Nine Years. The Luxury Features I Got For $10,500 Are Incredible
Please tell me that you are going to convert your Metropolitan! That would be a cool little EV swap. If not, I’d like to suggest that you tub it and drop in a turbocharged Buick V6. Make a 7/8 hot rod.
There seems to be a lot more going on outside North America with 3rd party Leaf replacement batteries. Saw a New Zealand example recently that not only included the same 40kWh of the extended battery, it even had liquid cooling EVs Enhanced To Offer 16 Blade LFP Battery Packs For Nissan Leaf – CleanTechnica
So you’ve gone from bringing jeeps back to life to reviving EVs.
This will be very interesting!
My lady friend had a prius with a failing battery and the red triangle of death. Trips to ‘reputable’ shops had the battery replacement quote well over the blue book of the car. Dang, I guess it was scrapped. Kept searching and found a place down near Seatac airport that would dig in and replace just the bad cells on the prius to make the battery good again. Cost about $600 and she was good as new. Place was sketchy, but the work was top notch.
I’m familiar with that shop. I was sketched out too but they did great work.
I looked into a used Leaf for my grandson as a commute to high school car. It seems like it would be well suited for that use, but decided not to take the plunge. Went with an old Saturn instead which I have a lot of experience with and the car was cheaper than a replacement battery for the Leaf.
What does it cost to replace the battery? I know the Prius can do refurbished batteries for cheap. I’m considering an old Leaf as a second car so thats a real possibility for me
like 10k, not worth it.
I saw elsewhere it’s $10k for the upgraded pack. Regular pack is $5k which isn’t bad at all
What I am most concerned about is cost per mile. EV’s sound great until you wrap your head around depreciation. The market is starting to figure depreciation out and it is about what I expected. $30,000 of depreciation in 70,000 miles sounds pretty horrible to me.
Most EVs are built as landfill fodder. Teslas, for all their faults and quality control problems, are actually built to last, and their greatly reduced depreciation vs even most ICE cars considers this. It’s not uncommon for a Tesla’s battery to last over 250,000 miles, and even 500,000 miles has been done. But there is a roughly 15 year built-in shelf life for the battery, so it’s a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.
Good luck repairing any modern EV. They’ve been made greatly more complicated than they should be, on purpose. Almost everything about them is serviceable by dealership-only, locked behind proprietary tools/software and paywalls. But the same is also happening to modern ICE cars too.
Good points. I think it’s going to be difficult to run “beater” EVs unless you’re extremely capable of hacking electronic systems.
Still better than German Luxury Depreciation – which means your $70,000 Mercedes/BMW/Audi will be worth $40,000 in 3-4 years/30-40K miles time.
(Which is why the best German to actually buy is a 2-4 year old model off-lease)
People considering buying a Nissan Leaf are not considering a German Luxury car.
Barely running rusty old jeeps to barely running, at least waterproof inside, EVs just for Fun. I so enjoy David’s escapades. He keeps me from making bad decisions.
> the dirt-cheap Nissan Leaf I bought
Why?
He’s talked about doing an EV conversion on various projects before, I think the FC Jeep was one of them. He mentions it at the end of the article – this is a parts car towards that project.
i thought he sold the FC.
Yeah, pretty sure it was lost in the great “Detroit Purge”
I think he was still talking about doing an EV swap on the Golden Eagle, though
I forgot how terrible those early EVs looked back then.
Only now,10+ years later, do i have slightly less hate for the extended ass.There are no excuses for bad design
I love my tired, old, low-range 2011 Leaf. I live and work in a city, rarely need to take freeways, and have been able to take my monthly $150 gas and maintenance budget on my last car down to about $30. They’re definitely not for everyone, but for urbanites they are cheaper and way more comfortable and convenient than a bus pass.
Still have to park and insure them.
So you are going to swap out the battery with some AA NiMH batteries? Ooh maybe put a small Honda generator and make it a hybrid, perhaps you will recycle some old laptop batteries to make a new pack. Or go full toecutter and rip out everything to make it lighter.
Can’t wait to see.
DT will go reverse toecutter: strip everything and install that seized Jeep engine you *know* he left behind in a friend’s shop back in Troy
I actually looked at a few Fiat 500e’s a few months ago, they seem like a bargain at $8k although their range tops out around 70-80 miles on a charge. They’re under warranty for 8 years as well, and they seemed like genuinely cool and comfortable cars for a daily commute. Didn’t pull the trigger, but I might seriously consider them again in the future if I need one. It’ll depreciate like a rock and be worthless once that warranty runs out, but still.
This just shows that EVs have even longer to go before they are of equal value purchase to an ICE. Because
1. The sticker price is close but only with $7,500 rebates or govt help.
2. Even if it starts at same price without discounts the resale value of an ICE car with 100,000 miles will be at least $10k more than a half battery EV.
3. Current cost comparisons I have seen figure the full cost of gasoline with all the federal, state, and local taxes. At least 60 cents a gallon. While EVs aren’t paying their share yet you can bet on the government hunger for money to waste being added and then cost of running an EV rises at least 22.5%.
4. Also who is buying a low range EV? They didn’t sell well early on because range anxiety any used ones need a new pack.
5. Now if the UAW gets what it wants with regards to EVs, no loss of jobs, employees on the auto line and battery line unionized, everyone gets that 40% raise old and new. Well I bet on horse drawn carriages making a big comeback.
Will someone besides me please do the math?
The low range compliance EVs won’t be big hits, but you would think people would pay as much for them as golf carts.
Also, the Leaf was uniquely terrible for battery degradation. Pretty much every other EV has a liquid cooled pack making it much more survivable. LiFePO4 packs should be even better still.
Thanks for a thoughtful response. I won’t argue but question. I don’t golf are these permitted on golf courses? Isn’t pretty openly accepted batteries degrade and thus far how much is unknown? You know that Toyota corolla is running at 45 mpg for 300,000 miles. Not so EVS at no additional cost. Maybe?
If the data we see from 10 year old Tesla’s is consistent, they should retain 80-90% of battery health about 200-300k miles into their use which is good news. The big big problem with the Leaf was simply the air cooling of the batteries but you can thank Carlos Ghosn for that bone headed cost reduction decision.
I may be wrong but stories I have read lately are you don’t get the range from a brand new Tesla they promise. Studies show 80% Tesla has a customer service that hoodwinked questions about not getting the original range promised. I don’t think used range will be goodie the promised new range is only 80% of what is promised.
We are talking about 2 different topics. The topic of discussion is battery health, not vehicle range.https://www.notateslaapp.com/tesla-reference/1371/tesla-shows-data-around-battery-life-span-just-12-degradation-after-200-000-miles#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20Tesla%20batteries%20degrade,investment%20in%20research%20and%20development.
So Tesla lied then puts out a fake story and I don’t believe either lie
When it comes to Tesla, that’s a wise attitude.
Truth. “Don’t trust, but verify.”
My pleasure, and likewise. In the south, lots of people are spending $5-12K on golf carts to drive around neighborhoods. They never see a golf course.
The Corolla I grew up with averaged 38mpg over 427000 miles. My dad was a bit obsessive with tracking costs, but it got hard after 370K when the odometer stopped working. He didn’t do any of his own work, oddly.
I agree the cheapest, and most eco-friendly option, is a used economy car. Ideally a Gosslin style save and fix special! But if you will support production of a new vehicle, it’s pretty great to have a “full tank” each morning, be able to precondition climate, and have the torque and space that an ICE can’t match.
Good battery management and thermal protections make a battery able to have a long and productive life. It’s why I can get over a decade of productive use from laptop and power tool batteries, and use an iPhone for 5 years before replacing.
LifePo4 is never going to be a viable EV tech. Given the low-C supported by LifePo4, you’d need a lot of battery packs for regeneration to work (or staged recharging; IE, some kind of high-cycle/high-C pack that can take the surge then charge the main pack slowly). LifePo4 also can’t charge below freezing (well, effectively can’t; the equivalent of the leaf’s 24kwh battery pack could charge at a whopping 240watts/hour below freezing, meaning you’d get about 3/4 of a mile of charge for every hour you’re hooked to the charger). And that same 240 watts is insufficient to keep the pack above freezing to support fast charging.
Much more likely is more widespread use of LTO (lithium titanate oxide), which has been used on EV’s (like the Honda Insight) over the years. I use it as part of a 48v solar-charged array, mostly because it has excellent deep-discharge and harsh-weather characteristics. But the two major manufacturers are Toshiba (whose SCiB batteries are the epitome of awesome) and… a Chinese state-sponsored concern. Without local production (or Panasonic jumping into the mix), it’s unlikely to happen here in the US.
….tell that to my current car, running on LiFePO4. LTO is great, if you have no need for energy density. I think it would be perfect for city buses, and airport tugs.
Am genuinely curious where you’re at and what the car is, as there are no non-boutique manufacturers of EV in the US that have used LifePo4 for anything. Tesla uses LifePo4 in China (as do many others), and there are some European/South America/Central America models that spec it. Rivian and Ford have plans to potentially use LifePo4 for MY24 stuff, but everything else in the US has used NiCad, LiON, Nickel-Cobalt-Managanese, or LTO.
I’m happy to update my knowledge accordingly.
Wish Autopian had an edit function… meant to say “US manufactured EV’s” – Tesla has a couple LifePo4 models, but the battery packs are manufactured in China.
I’m genuinely surprised that that’s the direction some manufacturers seem to want to go, as LifePo4’s discharge limitations means you’re adding a lot of weight to get equivalent performance; LTO might have lower density, but it can discharge faster, allowing equivalent performance at lighter weight, and doesn’t have the cold issues. And the major provider is Japanese, rather than Chinese, which simplifies supply chain considerations. Then again, maybe the cold thing is a more ephemeral issue:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42860946/ford-plant-lithium-iron-phosphate-batteries-ev/
Apparently 95% of drives happen in above-freezing weather. I would not have guessed that.
I’m near the coast in South Carolina, so very rare to have weather below freezing. I grew up near Lake Erie, and would not have purchased this car up there! Since 2022, all the Tesla Model 3 (please internet, M3 means a totally different car!) RWD models have used LFP packs from China. My car was made in Fremont. I was wanting a PHEV and considering a Bolt or an older compliance EV, but my wife was only willing to go nice new car and I didn’t want to deal with having to make sure she kept the battery between 20-80%.
To be clear, the Leaf is an outlier when it comes to battery health because they air cool. Almost every other EV liquid cools. Something like a Bolt with 100k miles has very little battery degradation and you can expect those batteries to go about 15 years (plus having 260 miles to start means the degradation matters less)
Looks like you need to get into testing and swapping battery cells in your Leaf. And you can get good used one from places like this:
https://www.greentecauto.com/hybrid-battery/repurposed-batteries/nissan-leaf/nissan-leaf-battery-modules-7-6v-gen-1
And this place will also do upgrades and up to 280 miles of range seems possible:
https://www.facebook.com/QCcharge?ref=embed_page
Zoiks. A $10,000 battery into a $2000 used Nissan Leaf? Not me, thanks.
But consider whether a $12,000 leaf will have a battery that is new and improved… with a solid 150 miles of range.
That $10,000 battery gives it range that is 50% better than when it was new.
That has to be worth something, no?
That’s a battery to upgrade the range. If you just want to replace with what was there you’re looking about $4k which isn’t bad at all
I just traded a 2015 Leaf SL with 10 bars remaining. Fully charged, it would show as much as 70 miles on the GOM but I really had roughly 50 useable miles. Obviously weather affected that heavily as well as where I drove. Backroads on a nice temperate day? Sure, 50 miles all day. Highway in 30-degree weather? Better turn off the heat and keep it to 55mph so I can successfully complete my 25-mile round trip commute.
Early in my Leaf ownership, I got what turned out to be great advice from fellow Leaf-ers: turn off the heat, use the heated seat and steering wheel, and wrap a blanket around my legs. That felt funny but I got used to it and it really made a difference to the functional range.
After five years of ownership (over which the car lost those two battery bars) I felt like I had conquered my range anxiety. I knew the car’s limits and didn’t test them. However, when I traded it for a Chevy Bolt and basically quadrupled my range, I definitely felt a a huge mental weight drop from my mind. I never really defeated my range anxiety so much as learned to ignore it.
I absolutely miss those seats though. The interior quality of the Leaf was not great (lots of hard plastic) but man I could sit in those seats all day long. The Chevy is a lot more up-to-date with tech but I may as well be sitting on carpeted plywood.
Great points to save range. Am I the only person gobsmacked that with range anxiety being a major factor in EVs that they keep adding all kinds of electrical sappers? Is it so ridiculous to suggest a few analog features? Odometer, thermometer, speedometer, and maybe cut the toys that do more harm than good? I am not expert and since I am single a rely on the people here to tell me where I am wrong. And boy some of you really love that job. But I ignore those who call names and never present a single fact. A lot of those here but hey this site is for all car fans so I don’t get offended or deterred.
Besides driving, heat and cooling take the most electricity by far. My Bolt actually tells you the percentage all the gadgets use, and it’s always less than 1 percent. If I’m running AC on blast on a hot day here in socal, it will take between 5 and 8 percent. So the gadgets just don’t take any juice to run. It makes sense if you think about it. All those things are measured in watt/h. The ac/heater is 1 to 2kw/h, and the motor uses dozens to hundred kw/h.
No al that auxiliary stuff costs range
Let’s do some quick math on the range that all those accessories might cost us. Start with the stereo, since that’s the biggest drain beside climate control: if we’re running it at full volume, a stock amp is eating about 100w. Next up is the infotainment/gps computer: worst-case scenario would be about the power draw of a midrange laptop, or about 50w. You mention gauges and thermometers: those are all fed by passive sensors that power themselves via the things they’re measuring, so the only loss would be the display. At that size, a display panel is pretty unlikely to consume more than 5w.
I’m not sure what other “sappers” you might be thinking of, so let’s check our math so far. We’re at 155 watts of consumption, so to use 1kwh of battery, we’d be running them all at full-tilt for almost six and a half hours. In a Leaf, that equates to about 3.5-4 miles of range over that time, or significantly less than one mile lost to accessories for each hour of driving. Personally, I think the small comfort of a newfangled digital thermometer is worth losing 25 feet of range per hour.
Also if you’re running a 100W (RMS, but still) full tilt for 6 hours you won’t care about range or anything else really
On the Bolt, the interior heat is generated with a high voltage powered resistance heater. This method is less efficient than a heat pump (what certain other EVs use) would be. If your Bolt is equipped with heated seats and steering wheel, you can set the HVAC to an automatic mode which uses the heated seat and wheel to keep the driver comfortable in cold weather while reducing the use of the resistance heater in order to save energy. My wife had two different, leased Bolts (a 2017 and a 2020) – we always had her cars set up in this way.
Well, let me tell you how wrong you are and how you absolutely should be offended and deterred!
Actually, I totally agree with you. In an EV, I would rather save electrical use and weight by removing things like self driving sensors and actuators to turn the wheels. Hell, even crank windows would probably save a bit of weight an electrical use.
You can get discounts on your utilities if you own one, and you can put a new battery pack, though you’re talking real money at that point.
I found this interesting, it may make a project vehicle like this more feasible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRk_W0O-WUU
Dala is awesome!
Every EV guy I talk to says to never buy a used LEAF. Nissan cut too many corners on the battery.
But if you’re feeling adventurous, you could try dropping the battery out and measuring the capacity of each sardine-can module. Chances are that there’s one or two dead cells that are holding back the whole pack.