What Happens When My CHEAP Leaf DIES? | Used EV Range Test! - Shot On iPhone 13

hey guys welcome back to the channel now for those of you who don't remember recently I bought the cheapest proper electric car on auto trader a lovely pearlescent white Nissan Leaf it's a bit rough around the edges but it's also quite lovely I think I've been running it for a while now and it's been fantastic and I've been wanting to bring you one piece of content in particular for a while and it is the range test and today's the day I'm gonna deliver for you I've seen the comments I know you've been waiting too but don't worry it's happening right now foreign now I'm going to do this a bit different today I'm doing a vlog style because my lovely camera guys they didn't want to roll with me for ages doing a range test and I wanted to get this done ASAP so here it is we're going to jump on board I'm going to shoot the whole thing on my trusty Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max so if it's a bit rough around the edges I apologize we're going solo let's do it okay so we're on board the mighty Leaf let's fire it up it says key not detected I think the battery in the key is dead but there is actually a way around it what you do is you put the key itself up against the start button push it with the key there it started up now I've got to get the battery replaced but there you go on the screen it says I have 57 miles of range now remember that number 57 that's what we're going to try and Achieve if we get less than that I'll be a little bit disappointed I'm going to reset the trip computer now and then set off and we'll see what this bad boy can really do let's roll [Music] one of the first things I want to show you is that this car has two driving modes which is important when you're trying to conserve range it's got D and it's also got Eco if I move this driving selector switch down into the drive position again it goes into Eco and that gives me an estimated Five Mile bump roughly for the rest of this I'm going to stick to Eco and then hold back an eke out as much range as I possibly can [Music] I've got a couple of options for the way that I do this range test the first option is just to take it on a Motorway and just hammer it at 70 miles an hour and see how quickly it runs down but I think that would be very unfair because that's not how people drive this car not at all it's a city car you know people drive it in 30 mile an hour zones predominantly so I'm going to try and stick to this type of area and just go reasonably slowly in an environment where the leaf was actually designed to be driven oh I don't know if you heard that but it said in 200 yards speed camera so it's got like a built-in system for detecting speed cameras which is ironic because when would you ever speed in a Nissan Leaf you just wouldn't would you okay quick range update I've done about four miles now and the range is reading 59 miles which is still pretty decent let's keep going it's sort of guesswork really the car's trying to work out the range depending on a number of factors including the way you drive the temperature is what about sort of 17 degrees today um and a whole host of other things so it's detected that I'm driving very very economically so it's it said you know what Rory is amazing I'm going to bump the range up by two miles because it's him here's something that's interesting the leaf has a very clever and I think it was the first car to ever do this it's got a range bubble so it shows you where you are on the sat nav and it also shows you where you can drive to and make it back to your starting point and where you can drive to without making it back to your starting point it's saying I could probably drive to near Nottingham at the moment which seems a bit ambitious but there you go a nice little feature is actually really cool I think a couple of other cars have adopted that I've seen that in the mini electric um but just remember where that came from came from the mighty Nissan Leaf here's something else I find really fascinating and I'm gonna pull in to demonstrate this if I can find somewhere to stop yeah let's do a parallel park right here show off my parallel parking skills don't crash into anything that looks like absolute perfection I still got it I really do still got it right one question that I often get asked is how does aircon and heating affect the range in an electric car now I've done about seven miles of driving so far um and if I turn the air con on that drops look at that it drops by 10. it drops by 10 miles it's gone down 10 miles just by using the heating I'll turn up the fan now that doesn't really affect the uh the range too much and the temperature doesn't affect the range too much either I find that difficult to believe but that's what the car is saying but yeah you lose 10 miles of range by using the heating or aircon in the Nissan Leaf and that's an eco mode if I go into normal drive mode and I turn the heating on and off yeah 14 miles of range lost in normal driving mode which is very very significant in a car with range as small as this it's a good job that today is uh it's pretty warm so I'm not going to need the heating or the aircon to be honest with you but yeah in a car like this you're gonna have to avoid using aircon or heating as much as possible if range is very important to you right onwards [Music] okay quick range update I have done uh 14.7 miles with 44 miles of range remaining which is interesting because that adds up to 58 miles which is pretty much what the car was suggesting it would get in the first place so after a bit of fluctuation where it wasn't quite sure how many miles it was going to get it's sort of learned how I'm driving the car what types of roads it's being driven on and it's giving me what seems like a fairly accurate so far estimation or is consistent estimation of how many miles it's going to be able to drive the obvious question though is is 57 58 miles a decent amount of range it kind of depends on who you are and how you use your car if you're just going to drive it around in normal everyday situations like you know drop the kids to school or whatever I think it's probably fine because you can do 10 15 20 miles to school and then 20 back home and he's still got loads to spare if you want to drive a bit further then obviously it's going to become a bit of an issue originally the Nissan Leaf according to Nissan's very ambitious estimations shall we say could do 124 miles that's changed because obviously the battery has degraded over the years which is another issue that electric cars have but credit to Nissan they've been very open about their battery degradation in the leaf on the right hand side of the dash you have a little gauge to show you how healthy the battery is um and there are 12 bars in total I've lost four of those bars not me pressing but the cars lost four bars over the course of its lifetime so it's lost about a third of its capacity which is I mean it's quite significant but as long as you're aware of what it's lost then you can kind of recalibrate your expectations for the car's range and actually losing 33 of battery capacity over nine years is that such a bad thing I think that's actually doing all right considering that even petrol cars diesel cars lose an awful lot in terms of performance that the longer they live I think it's kind of to be expected really and the range hasn't fallen off a cliff completely because originally there's no way in Nissan Leaf could do 224 miles you'd be lucky if it did sort of 90 from memory when I used to drive these back in the day so this is interesting in front of me there's a Hyundai ionic 5 which is one of my favorite electric cars at the moment and it does make me think how will modern electric cars batteries degrade will it be a similar situation to the Nissan Leaf where it loses sort of 30 over the course of approximately 10 years I'm hopeful that that won't be the case actually I'd rather think that new battery electric cars protect their batteries a lot more efficiently than this Nissan Leaf because a lot of the new cars come with Battery preconditioning Systems that get the battery to the correct operating temperature they also have big buffers so for example they'll have let's say an 80 kilowatt hour battery capacity but 10 kilowatt hours of that isn't used so that means that you don't necessarily use the full capacity of the battery you don't charge it up to 100 and then drain it down to zero percent it's always sort of between I don't know 10 and 90 of usage which is one of the methods that you can use to protect the battery but give credit to the leak because it's lasted for ages it's done 70 000 miles on the clock and it's only lost 30 percent of its capacity this could easily go another seventy thousand and maybe lose another 30 percent of its capacity so to have a car that's done 140 000 miles um and still be able to do what's that going to be around 30 miles which is I guess a daily commute is that acceptable I think it might be in some people's eyes okay I'm getting a bit Fed Up driving around now it's it's lasting way too long maybe I should have taken it around the motorway I'm gonna pull in now for a little pit stop at a local eatery all right I've got my caffeine in my hand giant Lorry behind me I'm gonna give you a quick range update I've given 25 miles and I've got 32 miles of range remaining right I'm going to fast forward now to the good bit so come back in a second when things get a bit more serious so things are starting to get pretty juicy right now shall we say um I took it down to the point where it said 20 miles of range remaining and I got a low battery warning low battery charge is what she's I wish I ignored because we're out here with hearing science I took it down to 10 miles remaining and it was kicking off properly it was telling me look find a charging point right now and I was like no thank you we're pushing on then it got to nine miles remaining eight miles remaining seven miles remaining six miles remaining and at that point that's when it stopped giving me an estimate for how far it would go I traveled 56 miles and then it said you have no more no more chances bro it's on you I'm not telling you how far you can go in this thing because basically Anything could happen at this point you know we're not stopping right of course we're not stopping we've now done 58 miles which is more than the car said it would do so I've now basically surpassed the original expectations of the Nissan League I feel like that's a small victory but we're not stopping here we're pushing on females travel that is a nice round number that's a proper Milestone I like that I like that because like I said I think the original Nissan Leaf with a full battery pack with 100 battery health would probably be able to do around 90 miles having lost about a third of its capacity I would expect this to do 60 miles and it's done it yes let's let's keep going [Music] okay 65 miles and we're starting to lose power now um especially in eco mode yeah the car is definitely not giving me as much acceleration as it did in the beginning not that I want to use it but you can definitely feel like it's starting to like throttle back a little bit trying to eke out as much range as possible like it senses that it's about to come screeching to a halt well there's a quick what happens what happens when it runs out does it just stop does it does it roll what I don't know do I want to find out no see okay 65 and a half miles I'm gonna I'm pushing my luck I'm gonna um I'm gonna call it quits I'm gonna pull in because yeah I don't want to get stuck out here on the road I'm putting in I'm pulling in we've definitely made it we're safe we are safe but it's still it's still moving it's still going which is the annoying thing because we've still got range in the battery should I stop should I stop or should I keep going I'm gonna stop I'm gonna stop it's still moving though no I'm gonna keep going I'm turning around I'm turning around I'm doing this for you guys I'm turning around because I think we all want to see how far this actually goes I'm definitely gonna regret this but we need to know how far the car goes and importantly what happens when it runs out so let's do it go whoa oh it stopped that's it it's gone into neutral it stopped 66 miles dead and the battery is completely exhausted so we got we got our answer to two questions um the first the second question which is what happens when an electric car when the leaf runs out of battery it just goes into neutral and rolls I guess that makes sense because what it wants you to do is to be able to roll it out of trouble like push it to the side side of the road or to push it to a charging point for example but the main question which is how far can this Nissan LEAF go is 66 miles dead on a full charge with about a third of the battery health um depleted which I think is a bit of a win because remember the original number was 57 miles and we've gone nine miles further than the car anticipated wow I'm so happy that I wasn't on the road when that happened that is someone's looking out for me all right result I think that's it we've answered the question I'm so glad that we could bring you this range test I know you've been waiting for it for a long time um we've got our answer the leaf can go 66 miles dead um maybe a bit further if I was you know if I was driving a bit more economical but I I wouldn't expect a lot more from that ah cool that my heart is actually pounding so I just want to say thanks for watching um I hope you stay tuned to the rest of this project leaf series because we've got a lot of really cool stuff planned for this we're gonna do some um some mechanical stuff some maintenance stuff to show you what electric cars cost in terms of um running repairs uh we'll do modificate big modifications this thing is going to look insane again thanks for watching and we will see you guys in the very very near future for more of the same foreign [Music]

Channel: AutoTrader

Views: 509,947

Keywords: nissan leaf range test, Autotrader leaf, what happens when an electric car battery dies, what happens when an ev, what happens electric car, electric car range test, electric car real world range test, range test, project leaf, electric car battery, battery recycling, ev battery recycling, ev battery degradation, battery degradation

Id: NwTuk1kxc20

Length: 16min 19sec (979 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021