Guru
Joined: 03/06/2019
Location: AustraliaPosts: 1578
| Posted: 06:15am 22 Jan 2021 |
This isn't a new thing all together with imports.
Some many years back, Japanese front cuts were being brought into the country in great number. They were really cheap and you got all the desirable bits, Engine, gearbox, front panels etc. They sold heaps of them.... For a short while.
Didn't take long to realise that the same car from Japan was often very different to what we had here. Front guards had holes for wing mirrors no one had here, engines had or didn't have distributors for timing, controls worked differently and so it went. The upshot was there were many differences and a lot that wouldn't fit local cars and was therefore useless.
These things were not the bargain they seemed at all. Seems the same with the leafs.
In the US there are people doing refuted/ rebuilt EV packs but I can't see that happening for a long time here. The demand would not be enough to keep people in business. With EV prices falling, who is going to go spend say $11K on something like an old leaf when you can get a new Kia for I think around $35K ? Even a used EV of much younger years would probably be a better deal.
There is a wreckers in Vic or SA selling 5 Kw tesla modules for about $2K. I think that's still on the high side but at least they are decent quality. There are a lot of people absolutly Possessed with lipo these days and I'm not putting anyone down that has them, just what I read on a lot of particularly US forums, they go on like they are the ONLY battery chemistry out there that could be considered.
Most of what I have been looking at people are using them for home storage when a lot of their properties they go on about being weight and size don't matter much anyway.
I would -think- that an old leaf would well have more value in the parts than the sum total. Even though there aren't a lot of them around, there wouldn't be a big parts supply either. Battery pack being rather poorly designed on those things with no cooling is going to be the big demand and I'd imagine like everything else, front and and bumpers/ tail lights would be the next sought after. Most likely as with everything else, forget about interior and driveline could be iffy too although sensors and controller are always popular and have nothing to do with the type of motovation of the vehicle.
Many on the net will tell you EVs don't need maintenance or repairs, another look on the net will quickly reveal how many EV specialist work shops there are in the US and plenty of YT vids on EV problems as well to dispel that Myth.
maybe one could get some of the cheap Chinese batteries and make a pack at reasonable cost that gave enough range to make the thing useful for local shopping etc. Of course with the tiny amount of fuel you'd save over a regular vehicle and with the costs of rego and even 3rd party insurance, may as well just get something, whatever it was, that you can use for a lot more practical everyday purposes.