An EV requires less maintenance than a petrol car, this is what most people think. Even as an EV driver, I always think that I should be able to use the vehicle with little to no maintenance required. I was mostly correct until now. When my EV mode threw up a turtle logo, I knew the time for huge maintenance was here.
WHEN DID THE ISSUE SURFACE?
After driving a total of 104 thousand KM, the car had its final goodbye. The Nissan Leaf now has its long-required rest and has been sitting in the workshop for 4 weeks now. In this post, we will go through what happened. Stay tuned for the next post in which I hope I will get the car back and explain in more detail. Now to start off the problem, we noticed that the car has intermittent issues with charging and because I only use public chargers, it was hard to determine if the charger or the car was the issue. After 4 months or so, the car finally went into turtle mode and decided to throw up the usual warning with additional error messages.
Turtle Mode
Let me explain what turtle mode is, apparently, it restricts power and you are unable to accelerate and get regen from braking. The car basically is a useless turtle at this point, still driveable but not advised to drive any longer. I drove it to Tan Chong and they said the car needed to stay at the workshop for 3 weeks. I was shocked and basically said that it was not possible. They decided to give me a courtesy car for me to use during this time, I decided to accept it because this period was a hectic one for my family and the car was supposed to help.
ISSUE WITH THE CAR
After diagnosing the issue, the car basically did not fit to be driven and required high-voltage battery modules to be changed. This was supposed to take 3-4 weeks but as you can see, I’ll need to write another post to update you guys after 3-4 weeks. The Nissan Leaf has battery modules instead of the batteries being in one whole piece, I thought it would be easier for the battery modules to be changed but the process seems very complicated and Tan Chong is struggling to the the parts required.
RESOLUTION
Currently, they require another few weeks to purchase the battery and get it replaced. I was given a courtesy car (Nissan Note) to use during the month and I am slowly getting impatient as to why this process is taking so long. My experience with the whole process feels like the turtle mode the car went into and remain slow until now. Any part but the high voltage battery can easily be replaced, do keep your motor and high voltage batteries in check during your EV ownership! Good luck to me in the future and the next post will be out at the end of december.
