Ray of sunshine?
We bought our Nissan Leaf on the 27th January 2014 out right apart from a 5 year lease on the battery, which gave us ownship of the battery at the end of the lease.
Only two years later we were told we were on a “Flex battery lease” which has no end date 😮
And we couldn’t get out of it, until last year. This video from the Electric Vehicle Man (I know he’s in an ICE for this video, ignore it, that’s not the point) states that all cars on the Flex plan have this captured in their V5.
Except, ours doesn’t.
We also do not have a copy of the lease agreement from the Nissan dealer we bought the lease from.
I have raised a complaint with Nissan on this subject and asked what our status is, because we have nothing (including a statement from Nissan Finance) saying we’re on a flex plan. Unless you ring them up.
We didn’t sign up for an indefinite lease: we tend to own cars for their life not trade them in every couple of years. So if the car lasts for 39 years (it should get to 200,000 miles before the battery degrades to 20kWh instead of 24kWh and we’re doing 5,500 miles per annum at the moment), we’d have paid out £16,800 on the lease for a car worth no where near that for a battery originally worth £5,000.
By our understanding, we should have £1,900 to pay to own our battery. Big difference.
We do really love the car, we really don’t love how it was sold to us and this confusion.
(What’s really irritating was we could have bought the battery on the day we bought, we had the cash).
Update
So having phoned Nissan UK, we had a call from our local dealer who gave us a closure amount of £2203.48. We did that yesterday.
Our Leaf is 100% ours. 😀
Posted: August 3rd, 2018 under Driving off the grid.