4th Capacity Bar Loss
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You’re... OUT!

February 17, 2017

Mark D Larsen


My LEAF’s battery, that is.

Looks like the capacity fluctuations that struck me as so worrisome turned out to be much ado about nothing. I had concluded in that post that, to qualify for a battery replacement under warranty, “the capacity would have to start to decrease at a much faster rate than it has increased for the last three months.” To my great astonishment... it did!

I don’t know if it is merely a coincidence, but a couple of weeks ago my 12V battery died after displaying my LEAF at a transportation expo. I therefore replaced it with an Optima Yellow Top the next day. Surprisingly, the next time I took a capacity reading, it had dropped down significantly. Yesterday it registered 65.30%, nearly a full percentage lower than the supposed 4th bar threshold, as shown in the screenshot below on the left.


Low Down
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Miles driven
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I had gone to the store in the afternoon, and was driving home when I glanced down at the dashboard, shown above on the right. I noticed that something looked odd. When I had pulled into the store parking lot earlier, I had one less charge bar than the number of capacity bars, but now they were even with each other. I then realized that... there were only 8 capacity bars showing! I had lost the 4th bar at 52,601 miles, with still another 39 days to go until the capacity warranty would expire. Looks like I’ll get a free replacement after all! I have set an appointment with my local dealer so that the technician can verify the readout and initiate the process of ordering the new pack and bracket to fit my 2012 model.

Below is a graph of all the capacity readouts I have taken with LEAFStat. You can see that, despite the weird, inexplicable rise in percentages during the previous three months, suddenly they dropped down precipitously, low enough to turn off the 4th bar:

When the new “lizard” battery arrives, I will ask the technicians to allow me to take some photos to include in a future post about the installation process. After years of steadily diminishing range, I will be euphoric to have a “new” LEAF again!