Nissan Announces Leaf Battery Pack Pricing

[mechman600]

Originally Posted by P-hack

but it would be remiss to not mention the cycle life, which is like 300 for a leaf cell, vs 2000 for a calb cell, so you will be replacing leaf cells 7x as often. Plus more temperature sensitivity in the leaf cells. The lifepo4 really are a lot more bullet proof and well supported in charging/monitoring, and that is all good news for diy'ers.

I find it strange that Nissan used such a temperamental, short-life cell with no real thermal management. You can see it on the Leaf forums - degradation after only a year. It is really unfortunate. I guess they thought all along that regular replacement with a fairly cheap pack would be the norm. Makes you wonder how many original Leaf purchasers will purchase another one.

Contrast this to the Chevy Volt that seems to show absolutely zero degradation after 50K miles. Obviously much of this is in the battery management software - using a relatively small portion of the total capacity and adjusting this portion over time to simulate zero degradation. But still.

[NeilBlanchard]

The Leaf cell is far more than 300 cycles. My sister-in-law has a Leaf with 18,000 miles on it and it still has 100% battery capacity. That is close to 1,800 cycles. And the new Leaf cells are improved.