I have a 2011 Leaf that I bought secondhand a couple of years ago. The original battery is already over 10 years old and I've noticed the range has dropped quite a bit - now I'm getting around 80 km at most. Should I start saving up to replace it, or does it still have some useful life left in it?
The 2011 Leaf batteries typically last between 8 and 10 years before you notice serious degradation, but yours is already well past that. At 15 years old with only 80 km of range, your battery has lost a ton of capacity - it's probably down to 60-70% of its original capacity or less. Technically it could keep working for a while longer, but it's already in the zone where it becomes impractical for daily use.
The thing is, a battery that degraded doesn't just limit your range, it also charges more slowly and puts more stress on itself every time you use it. If your plan is to keep the car for just another year or two, it might be worth just leaving it as is and saving your money for something else. But if you want to keep it running longer and have it actually functional, yeah, I'd start putting money aside because a battery replacement is going to cost you a serious amount.
That said, some of the older Leaf batteries have held up surprisingly well thanks to the car having passive cooling and people taking pretty good care of them. Anyway, with the numbers you're mentioning, yours is pretty degraded. It really depends on how much range you need day to day and how long you're planning to keep the Leaf.
Is the original battery still holding a charge, or does it drain quickly even when you're not using the car? Because at 15 years it's pretty much at the limit, but what really matters is whether it still retains decent energy or if it dies on you in just a few hours.
80 km is pretty short for a Leaf, so you've probably already gotten through the worst of the degradation. What happened with someone close to me who had a hybrid was that it got to a point where replacing the battery made more sense than constantly stopping to charge, but that depends on how much you actually drive. If you just need it for short city trips, it could still get you by for a while longer, but if you want to do longer distances, yeah, start saving up because replacement batteries aren't cheap.
My mom had something similar happen with an electric car a few years back, and basically once the range drops that sharply, it just keeps degrading. At 15 years old, your battery is in the danger zone: most likely you've got a year or two left before it becomes really uncomfortable to use. If you notice it drains fast even when parked, or if you see it losing charge way faster in winter, that's a sign it's nearing the end. I'd say start saving now, because when it becomes urgent it's not going to be cheap.
At 15 years old with 80 km of range, your Leaf is pretty much at the limit and it's probably still losing capacity month after month, so I'd say yeah, start saving up. What you should check first is whether the car has a history of how the battery was taken care of (slow charging, controlled temperatures) because that affects how much longer it'll last, but realistically, a battery that old that's already dropped that much in performance isn't going to bounce back.
Don't wait for the range to drop to 50 km to take action, because at that point the car becomes almost unusable for any trip. What nobody mentioned is that before you invest in a new battery, you should check with an OBD2 scanner specific to the Leaf to see the real degradation status of each cell module, because sometimes the range loss comes more from uneven balancing than from total battery failure. That costs you little and tells you whether it's worth repairing just the problematic cells or if it's already time for a full replacement. At 15 years old your battery is near the end of its life, but those 80 km you have today can be maintained for a couple more years if you don't do constant fast charging and let it cool down properly between trips.
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