Query, 8 June 2017: “Hi Henrik. A friend checked my Leaf’s battery health using LeafSpy (see attached screenshot). He was a little surprised that it was as low as 87% for a 2016 car with some 7000 k’s on the clock. Can you advise? Regards, Tony.”
Our reply: Yes indeed, 87% is a low score for battery health for a 2016 car. I attach the Benchmarking report for battery health vs Year of manufacture for May:
You can see this report on your second dashboard/sheet of reports. Just log in, and click on the right chevron ‘>’ at the top and it will take you to the ‘NZ Data’ dashboard. You can download the report via Excel or Pdf, or email it to yourself by clicking on the ‘Export’ buttons at the top. The report shows that so far yours is the lowest SoH for a 2016 vehicle in the Flip the Fleet panel.
There are several potential reasons for your low score: The car may have sat for a long time at full charge before you bought it, perhaps on a boat from UK, or sitting in the sales yard? This is almost the worst thing to do to a battery. A few other instances have been reported to Flip the Fleet of a rapid step down in battery State of Health (SoH) just after the car hits the road in New Zealand, but we need more data to see if this is a regular occurrence. I wonder if you could get a scan of the car from whoever sold it to you at the time it was registered in NZ so we can see if it rapidly dropped once used. It is also noticeable that you have a high proportion of Quick Charges – along the top of the scan you will see reference to 65 QCs (quick charges) and 51 L1/L2 (slow) charges. Most people are claiming that the number of quick charges makes little difference to battery degradation, but the fragmentary data in so far for Flip the Fleet is hinting that people may be underestimating this effect. It’s exactly the sort of question that we are trying to answer but it’s too early to make a call. Thirdly, your car may have come off the production line at the very start of 2016 and so have 12 month’s more wear compared to one manufactured in December.
You can see more discussion of battery SoH changes in Test Driver memo #7 posted earlier on these discussion pages.
Cheers, Henrik
Hi Henrik, great effort you are doing here and i am a recent Leaf owner and also recently joined up with you.
Purchased a 2015 24kwh Leaf off local respected dealer, came with dealer leaf spy report done the same day i purchased. Ahr 60.72 SOH 92% Hx 90.23% odo 10,075km 79QC’s&297L1/L2. Seemed about right from what i had researched.
My dongle and Leaf spy lite arrived 7 days later and was surprised at the drop in the report. Ahr 57.77 Soh 88% Hx 82.36% odo 10,337km 70QC&304 L1/L2.
I ran a check on Car Jam and see the odo at 9953km so guess this is point of entry and wasn’t very impressed to see the listed year as 2015 (2014-11) This was not on the dealers window card so a bit disappointed to see that i have a 2014 manufactured car when i specifically wanted a 2015. (haven’t bought this up with the dealer yet as was wanting to see if the soh would stablise.
I have been keeping and eye on the leafspy report and have the pro set up now and find tonight i have dropped another 1% soh to 87% and odo 11,040. I have done one fast charge and the rest L1/L2, running battery right down on a couple of charges and right back up till 100%. Mixed running . short trips and longer 50kms trips. The car is in show room condition with jap service record and was what attracted me to this vehicle, i had the choice from the dealer of about 3. As you can imagine i was really hoping the soh might settle but so far looks like a downward trend. I will certainly keep watching and have some longer 100km runs planned in the future. Trust this data may be of interest to you. Cheers Ken.