Nissan planning on 300+ miles range Leaf ?

Electroman · Jun 27, 2015

[I am surprised that there is no mention about this here. If this is already being discussed, mods please merge]

We all know that 2016 Leaf expected to hit the dealerships in Sept this year will have a moderate increase of 25 more miles range with the addition of 6 kWh bringing the total battery capacity to 30 kWh. Thats old news. In the shareholders meeting a few days ago in Japan, Carlos Goshn, talked a bit on their continuing efforts to bring a long range EV and showed a video to illustrate what they are "envisioning". And then my jaw literally dropped what I saw on the video. It is all in here in this article from Inside EVs.

Future Nissan LEAF Envisioned With 338 Miles Of Range - Video

What they are envisioning and what they can achieve might be two different things, but they are aiming really high. How high? 300+ miles high. I have no hope they will come anywhere near 300 miles, but even if they did anything close 225+ I will be more than thrilled.

If this Leaf (or whatever it is called) hits the streets one day before Model 3, this will be in my garage. I don't care about 0 to 60, or fancy touch screens or eye candy gull wing doors. With the extreme high reliability (no hyperbole) I am used to in the Leaf, I would grab a nofrills, highly reliable 200+ miles Nissan over Tesla.

roblab · Jun 27, 2015

mkjayakumar said:
What they are envisioning and what they can achieve might be two different things, but they are aiming really high. How high? 300+ miles high. I have no hope they will come anywhere near 300 miles, but even if they did anything close 225+ I will be more than thrilled.

If this Leaf (or whatever it is called) hits the streets one day before Model 3, this will be in my garage. I don't care about 0 to 60, or fancy touch screens or eye candy gull wing doors. With the extreme high reliability (no hyperbole) I am used to in the Leaf, I would grab a nofrills, highly reliable 200+ miles Nissan over Tesla.

The article states that these numbers are the Japan driving cycle, which are much higher than the EPA. It states that when converted to EPA, it is equivalent to 200 miles.

We have known this all along. Tesla states that they expect to have 240 mile range on the 3. As to "extreme high reliability", many have found that the Leaf's current battery, which does little in temperature maintenance, tends to have trouble driving in mountains and heat. Many Leaf owners are experiencing a large drop in range over time.

The new Leaf battery will be a different chemistry which will be less prone to heat damage (because of the current problems).

Tesla states that their price will be $35,000 before rebates. I did not see a price for the 2nd gen Leaf.

dhanson865 · Jun 27, 2015

It's from the shareholders meeting video and Ghosn just said that it was their goal for some day down the road. Pure graphics fluff. No prototype or specs of any kind. No release date, no promise it will ever happen, just a desire / goal / dream someone had.

and frankly I'm tired of seeing it on forum after forum. Doesn't anybody have an ounce of skepticism anymore?

omgwtfbyobbq · Jun 27, 2015

roblab said:
The new Leaf battery will be a different chemistry which will be less prone to heat damage (because of the current problems).

I thought they already offered "lizard" batteries to counteract losses associated with heat, or is there some other chemistry out there (lizard++)?

dhanson865 · Jun 27, 2015

omgwtfbyobbq said:
I thought they already offered "lizard" batteries to counteract losses associated with heat, or is there some other chemistry out there (lizard++)?

The 2015 model has the "lizard" / heat resistant chemistry. It hasn't been out long enough for anyone to know how much it helps. Heck we still don't know how much the 2013 models degrade.

We are still waiting for this summer and fall to get second summers heat in the works and cause or not cause the battery degradation on the 2013 Leafs since most leaf drivers only notice if a bar drops and that is 15% for the topmost bar it takes a while to notice.

Nissan could be changing the battery chemistry every 3 months, once every 18 months, or not at all and we'd have no way of knowing since we tend to lump it all by model year and no one that I know is dissecting the packs down to cell level and testing the chemical makeup.

Electroman · Jun 27, 2015

Nissan is not Audi, the king of press releases. In fact as a Japanese automaker I would put them on the conservative and secretive side of announcing future developments.

338 miles undoubtedly represents the Japanese cycle tests which might translate to a realistic EPA range of 225 miles which is great.

But I wouldn't write them off like we all do for GM or BMW or Audi. Nissan is the only 'gas' automaker that is taking EVs seriously and is working on bringing EVs to mass market.

This coming during the shareholders annual meeting and from Carlos Goshn I wouldn't put this in the same bucket as Audi releases.

There are rumors that this might be 2017 or 2018 model.

stopcrazypp · Jun 27, 2015

For the record the Leaf is rated at 228km or 141 miles on the Japanese cycle. It is rated 84 on the EPA cycle. So 544 km/338 miles on Japanese cycle works out to 200 miles on EPA.

Canuck · Jun 27, 2015

mkjayakumar said:
With the extreme high reliability (no hyperbole) I am used to in the Leaf, I would grab a nofrills, highly reliable 200+ miles Nissan over Tesla.

Ha!

It better have "extreme high reliability" when you can't really take it anywhere! Despite that fact, my Leaf has had to be towed to the dealer because of the 12volt battery issue. My Tesla, on the other hand, just took me 300 km over two mountain passes to my cabin. My Leaf is parked at home -- good thing too because it was 40C today (104F) and with no thermal battery management, that "highly reliable" Leaf would degrade it's already very low range battery. But boy does that image of 544 km look photoshopped good!

Don't get me wrong, I like my Leaf, but to claim it's better, or more reliable, than a Tesla (as your quote above seems to suggest) is laughable.

David99 · Jun 27, 2015

mkjayakumar said:
But I wouldn't write them off like we all do for GM or BMW or Audi. Nissan is the only 'gas' automaker that is taking EVs seriously and is working on bringing EVs to mass market.

I think besides Nissan both GM and BMW have shown how serious about EVs. They are not Tesla who depends only on EVs. We can't expect any of the big car manufacturers to focus only on EVs. But that doesn't mean they are less serious about it than Tesla is. The fact that they still have a huge business going with ICE cars doesn't mean they are not seeing the future.
The majority of money they make is cars that are very average in many ways. The best selling cars are not the record breaker, the performance cars. GM, Nissa and BMW is placing their EVs in a segment where very large numbers of cars are sold and the buyers don't expect cutting edge performance or technology. Nothing wrong with that.

mattmass · Jun 27, 2015

It'd be awesome if Nissan can pull this off, and I hope they do. But if you get stuck charging at a one-stall CHAdeMO at a Nissan dealership, it's going to suck. I recently had a Nissan brand DCQC fail due to temp issues, and have had issues of some kind with most other CHAdeMO stations. And I have never seem a site with more that one CHAdeMO plug, though I assume some exist.

Long range implies road trips, and that's where Tesla's supercharger strategy shines.

dhanson865 · Jun 27, 2015

mattmass said:
It'd be awesome if Nissan can pull this off, and I hope they do. But if you get stuck charging at a one-stall CHAdeMO at a Nissan dealership, it's going to suck. I recently had a Nissan brand DCQC fail due to temp issues, and have had issues of some kind with most other CHAdeMO stations. And I have never seem a site with more that one CHAdeMO plug, though I assume some exist.

Long range implies road trips, and that's where Tesla's supercharger strategy shines.

All it takes is a supercharger connector agreement for the Leaf and my mindset towards Nissan changes dramatically.

They can do the Chademo to supercharger adapter the inverse of what Tesla did to avoid changing the physical design and just make the software / controller changes required to license supercharger access.

Heck I charged my Leaf to full at a chademo in Asheville, NC in 34 mins. With a beefy proper Chademo not some silly Nissan branded charger that overheats if you do more than 25 KW. My 2012 Leaf was happy to take in L3 charging at higher KW than I expected hearing others complain about Model S being throttled on Nissan Chademos.

Pay into the Tesla network and let Tesla do the logistics for new charge locations, the Nissan Dealers don't want to do it and for some reason Nissan thinks they can just contract this out to a random companies and not get burned.

Nissan Pulls Plug On CarCharging Agreement On 48 DC Fast Chargers

No until Nissan shows some vision on getting the charging system in order I'll always have a preference towards Tesla.

stopcrazypp · Jun 27, 2015

dhanson865 said:
They can do the Chademo to supercharger adapter the inverse of what Tesla did to avoid changing the physical design and just make the software / controller changes required to license supercharger access.

While a supercharger to CHAdeMO adapter works, the other way around doesn't really work. The CHAdeMO connector on paper peaks at 500V@200A. The ones so far are typically rated 125A.

The Tesla connector routinely tops 330A in the 85kWh and 300A in the 60kWh in the real world.

If Nissan wants access to the supercharger network they will likely have to install a new port. I don't see Tesla allowing access if the car is slower than 90kW in real world peak charging speeds. Esp, given the 135kW right now is likely not the limit of the connector hardware right now.

dhanson865 said:
Pay into the Tesla network and let Tesla do the logistics for new charge locations, the Nissan Dealers don't want to do it and for some reason Nissan thinks they can just contract this out to a random companies and not get burned.

If Nissan wants to take a page from Tesla, they can push the CHAdeMO spec to its limits and get about 80kW real world (400V@200A) and install/maintain stations in non-dealer locations using their own money. That would be a rough approximation to the supercharger network. Of course the shareholders probably won't agree to that.

mattmass · Jun 28, 2015

stopcrazypp said:
If Nissan wants access to the supercharger network they will likely have to install a new port. I don't see Tesla allowing access if the car is slower than 90kW in real world peak charging speeds. Esp, given the 135kW right now is likely not the limit of the connector hardware right now.

Why would using less current be an issue?

deonb · Jun 28, 2015

mattmass said:
Why would using less current be an issue?

Blocks the stalls for longer.

GSP · Jun 28, 2015

mattmass said:
Why would using less current be an issue?

Cars that charge slower would clog up supercharger stalls, requiring addition of more stalls sooner than if all cars could charge at a Tesla speed (effectively, amps = speed). The energy needed will be roughly the same for all cars: enough to maker it to the next supercharger, so slower charging = more time plugged in.

Tesla has stated that other automakers are welcome to use their supercharger network, provided the automaker produces cars that can charge at the full rate, and pays their share of the supercharger network costs.

GSP

KJD · Jun 28, 2015

mkjayakumar said:
If this Leaf (or whatever it is called) hits the streets one day before Model 3, this will be in my garage. I don't care about 0 to 60, or fancy touch screens or eye candy gull wing doors. With the extreme high reliability (no hyperbole) I am used to in the Leaf, I would grab a nofrills, highly reliable 200+ miles Nissan over Tesla.

The Model 3 and the LEAF 2.0 have one thing in common, at this point they are both vaporware. Until you can go the local showroom or store and drive one, they do not really exist.

The US auto market is something over 16 million units now, so there is plenty of room for both Nissan LEAF and Tesla to exist in this market. Having said that, I will also say that the Nissan charge network is a miserable failure. This fact will relegate the LEAF to a niche product at best.

WarpedOne · Jun 28, 2015

Blocks the stalls for longer.

Compensated by smaller capacity.
Leafs are designed with chademo power in minds, so they would 'suck' as much current as the do from chademo chargers and charge for same length of time.

mattmass · Jun 28, 2015

@GSP and @deonb, definitely good points. Technically, it sounds like a Supercharger->CHAdeMO could be built, but it might be against Tesla's policy. Then again, could be compensated for as @WarpedOne suggests. We can't predict what kinds of negotiations might happen between Tesla and Nissan, so I think it is safe to assume that Nissan *could* get Tesla to change their policy here.

But I maintain that CHAdeMO-only (i.e. no supercharger compatibility) is pretty impractical for long-distance driving, and would make for uncompelling competition against the Model 3. Nissan seems quite committed to CHAdeMO but I don't think it, as a technology, enables mass-market long-distance travel.

dhanson865 · Jun 28, 2015

stopcrazypp said:
While a supercharger to CHAdeMO adapter works, the other way around doesn't really work. The CHAdeMO connector on paper peaks at 500V@200A. The ones so far are typically rated 125A.

The Tesla connector routinely tops 330A in the 85kWh and 300A in the 60kWh in the real world.

If Nissan wants access to the supercharger network they will likely have to install a new port. I don't see Tesla allowing access if the car is slower than 90kW in real world peak charging speeds. Esp, given the 135kW right now is likely not the limit of the connector hardware right now.

The car and the supercharger communicate over that connection. They can negotiate an acceptable charge rate that meets the restriction of the chademo connector quality.

With the smaller battery pack the Leaf wouldn't be there any longer than a Model S even if the rate is limited.

And besides if a Leaf is on the same pair as a Model S that's just more power left over for the other half of the pair.

Tesla would gain $2000 per chademo to tesla adapter sold and use that money to build out more stalls at existing sites and more new sites.

Electroman · Jun 28, 2015

I agree that the lack of fast charging options on the interstate will make the Leaf 2.0 or Bolt a 200 mile city car. That will be a big difference in the end.

Nissan planning on 300+ miles range Leaf ?

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