Nissan LEAF has 99.99% battery success rate

Nissan has revealed that the LEAF EV has a 99.99% battery success rate in Europe, with just three cars from the 35,000 sold in Europe failing.

We have to admit that we’ve always been concerned about the long-term viability of the batteries in electric cars; after all, we’ve all got laptops with batteries that struggle to manage 10 minutes after a year of heavy use, so why would batteries in an electric car be any different?

But it looks like we might have to admit that our concerns are unfounded, with Nissan revealing that in the five years since the LEAF launched just three battery packs in Europe – from a total of 35,000 LEAFs sold – have packed up. Which is astonishing.

That figure of just 0.01 per cent failure is an awful lot better than the 0.255 per cent failure rate reported for ICE cars in the same period, and with electric cars being up to 40 per cent cheaper to maintain than an ICE car it adds to the appeal of the EV.

Of course, there is still the problem of limited range with EVs that make them unsuitable for anything much more than urban commuting and errands – and that range will be compromised by any number of factors, including the deterioration over time – but it does look like we can stop worrying that EV batteries have a much shorter shelf life than ICE cars.

Robert Llewellyn, EV advocate, Red Dwarf’s Kryton and an early buyer of a LEAF, said:

This comes as no surprise. There was a lot of apprehension about electric technology in the beginning, but with sales climbing month-on-month I struggle to see how these myths continue to be regurgitated today.

So it looks like Kryton was right and we were wrong. Oh, well.