For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
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By riverrock
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1732317
The Zoe batteries have a "State of Health" indicator (starts about 102 so not a percentage) accessible via CAN Bus (£10 dongle will connect to a dedicated app called CANZE). So its pretty quick to get the battery health out of the car. The App also shows the current temp and voltage across each section of the battery. The battery is split into something like 12 modules which can each be individually replaced, which is what Renault normally do if there is an issue with one of them.
The lease made sense on a PCP deal when you're paying monthly anyway, and when battery long term health was a bit of an unknown. Also brought the initial purchase price down, which suited lots of people.
There was some strange insurance things going on, as some insurers would insure the car but not the battery (as you didn't own it) but your battery contract required you to have battery insurance.
Also if you were in an accident caused by someone else causing the car to be written off but the battery not damaged, the third party's insurance may refuse to pay for the battery to be re-patriated back to Renault (which Renault charge £2500 to do) so you end up out of pocket (sounds like madness but it has happened to a few people).

Now the batteries are a known quantity, its less risk to the end user and Renault have put a longer warranty on them so the desire for battery hire has diminished.
Colonel Panic liked this
#1732336
Surely the issue is not so much the absloute reliability or otherwise of battery packs, but the comparison with petrol and diesel. There is very little maintenance required for the drive train in an EV, certainly not my experience of ICE ownership!
There are already cars with over 100k miles in the US and the degradation is less than 10%.
Colonel Panic liked this
By riverrock
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1732399
On our service plan there isn't anything relating to drive train.
It has lots of standard physical checks, cabin air filter, a 12V battery replacement after a few years (apparently the electronics and apps are heavy on what is a normal car battery), brake fluid replacement (which apparently is expensive as you need the right computer to pump fluid from the blended braking control system and they put parts near a HV cable so they are supposed to spend an hour de-energising the car before touching it)...
Depending on what is due to be done, dealer services start about £90.
I suspect independents will be cheaper (eg some apparently don't bother de-energising the car before doing the brake fluid) and apparently you can knock off £30 if you buy and fit the cabin air filter yourself.

My diesel car's normal service is about £180 (plus the likely bit of broken suspension from pot holes / speed bumps).
By riverrock
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1732402
As an aside on brake fluid replacement - apparently you're supposed to get it done every 2 or 3 years as its hydroscopic, and once water contaminates it, it loses various required properties.
Do garages regularly do this?
I haven't gone back over old invoices but I can't remember my local garage doing this on my 57 plate honda. Apparently there are tests to check for water contamination which negates this?
#1732403
I have to fess up here

I was part of the process that brought into being the time-based draining and refilling of brake fluid when I worked with the marketing department of Automotive Products, the people who brought you Lockheed braking systems a while back.

The fluid is indeed hygroscopic (note spelling) and could after many years have absorbed sufficient moisture that under extreme conditions it could boil within the calipers and interfere with braking.

But the extreme conditions, something like a fully loaded and extremely powerful vehicle with the throttle jammed wide open descending the steepest alpine route you could imagine, are very unlikely to trouble your average shopping trolley or Chelsea tractor.

For sales of brake fluid it was a huge boost. The engineers, initially a bit reticent would only concede it would do no harm, and in the end marketing prevailed.

Rob P
#1732618
malcolmfrost wrote:Surely the issue is not so much the absloute reliability or otherwise of battery packs, but the comparison with petrol and diesel. There is very little maintenance required for the drive train in an EV, certainly not my experience of ICE ownership!
There are already cars with over 100k miles in the US and the degradation is less than 10%.


Annual service on my Leaf was half the cost of that on my mountain bike. Teslas don’t have a service interval.

We don’t yet know how long the current generation of Tesla batteries and cars will last, but current indications are that it will be for a long time and a lot of miles. Tesla service centre gave me an anecdote of an engineer in a specialist product area who travels all over the country. He’s put crazy mileage on a Model S and it was still going strong. They also said that, at my current run rate of 3k miles a month, I’m not an unusual buyer/user. Many Tesla owners drive high mileages. It’s in part due to people using the car a lot more than they expect - trips into Europe etc. just because they can. The car is nice to be in and cheap per mile. The more mileage you do then the more the car makes sense to own and use.
#1732620
@riverrock I’d need to dig out the invoice, but I think the service on the Leaf was £120, may have been £140. It’s basically an hour’s labour for a health check as there’s naff all to actually do. You get a nice video though.

Zero VED and zero luxury car tax as well. Bit of a palava having to go into the Govt website for a couple of minutes after a year and registering the zero cost renewal. Made me nostalgic for the £2.62 a month direct debit on one of our other cars where you don’t have to renew. Free parking in council owned bays and car parks too.
#1732628
Boxkite wrote:Would you buy a second-hand - say four years old - car, with batteries of the same age (and not leased) and of unknown condition? At least with leased batteries there are no worries if they are not up to scratch.


You’d get a health report (there’s also a display in the Leaf).

Battery tech has changed very quickly. Newer batteries are likely to run for far longer and better than ones made a few years ago. Add to that the battery conditioning that is in a number of cars and the batteries are protected and also designed to charge and run at optimum temps.

It was lack of active battery thermal management that opened up Nissan to criticism of the 40kWh Leaf. It’s fantastic as long as you don’t want to do multiple rapid charges a day and trigger the software protection.

Nissan now make a point of saying that their battery packs are serviceable and repairable.
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By JonathanB
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1732666
Leodisflyer, thanks for your honest and continual updates of your experiences - keep them coming! I definitely will be going full electric next year, I just have to decide what with!
Flyin'Dutch' liked this
By riverrock
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1732671
Leodisflyer wrote:@riverrock I’d need to dig out the invoice, but I think the service on the Leaf was £120, may have been £140. It’s basically an hour’s labour for a health check as there’s naff all to actually do. You get a nice video though.
.

Indeed - the Zoe service details are in this article (rest of article is a bit out of date) https://www.gogreenautos.co.uk/buyers-g ... -zoe-guide

No special parking privileges in Glasgow. When there is a charging point in a council car park you pay the same as all the other cars who aren't charging. I guess you don't pay for the electricity but most of the points are slow so I don't always bother.

Zoe has battery thermal management, using the air con system pointed at the battery rather than the cabin to heat /cool as appropriate. They've been on the market 7 years now and there isn't a single report of a battery being fully replaced under the 75% guarantee provided to those who lease the battery. Some have had faulty modules replaced but no full batteries.
#1732678
Leodisflyer wrote:Battery tech has changed very quickly. Newer batteries are likely to run for far longer and better than ones made a few years ago.

I fear that that statement will help glue the doubters to where they are now for even longer in to the future.
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By kanga
#1732693
riverrock wrote:As an aside on brake fluid replacement - apparently you're supposed to get it done every 2 or 3 years as its hydroscopic, and once water contaminates it, it loses various required properties.
Do garages regularly do this?
..


As mentioned in this or another (Tesla ?) thread. we take our 2 out of warranty cars (diesels, midsize 5yo and small 10yo) to the same independent for servicing. We have done so with earlier cars, and have no reason not to trust them for competence or integrity.

On this latest ('minor') service/MOT on the 5yo, they told me they had done some (density ? sg ?) test on the brake fluid and deduced that it had absorbed 'too much' water, and it had therefore needed complete replacement (and telephoned me before going ahead; I was happy to authorise). This is the first time they had done this on any of the cars which they have serviced for us over the years, but I have no reason to suppose either that the testing was new nor that it (or the story) was spurious. So this garage, at least, apparently does this 'test, replace if needed'. I am happy..
By riverrock
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1732701
I hope (I've no evidence) that most independent garages will test at each service and advise replacement when required, while I suspect dealers will blindly follow manufacturer advice and change based on a frequency.
I assume there will be professional level testers available, but you can buy your own for £15 on ebay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/113940577131 that you just need to stick into the reservoir.
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