Nissan Begins Repurposing Leaf Car Batteries as Portable Power Stations

Slowly but surely, sales of electric cars have crept upward as traditional automakers finally embrace EVs. Nissan was early to the electric future with the venerable if modest Leaf. Nissan is now looking to turn old Leafs into something new by harvesting their batteries. The company has begun selling portable power banks built around refurbished automotive batteries, which could give these expensive Leaf cells a new lease on life.

The Lithium-ion cells in vehicles have the same properties as the battery in your phone. They start out with a specific power rating, but successive discharge-recharge cycles cause physical stress to the internal structure. Eventually, this results in reduced capacity and voltage. However, Nissan says most Leaf owners stop driving the car before the battery stops working. In fact, many of the individual cells are still in good shape when the vehicles are discarded.

EV batteries have another thing in common with smartphone batteries—they contain expensive materials, and their manufacture comes with a not insignificant carbon footprint. So, reusing the cells after the car has reached the end of its usable life can help Nissan's bottom line as well as the planet.

Credit: Nissan

Each Nissan Leaf has around 48 lithium-ion battery modules—the exact number depends on model. While some may be in poor shape at the end of a car's life, Nissan has taken to disassembling the battery packs to refurbish working modules. The result is the Nissan portable power station, which was developed in partnership with JVCKenwood Corp. and 4R Energy Corp. The bulky 32-pound portable chargers contain two Leaf battery modules with about 80% of their original capacity intact. They're no longer suitable for driving an EV, but they can still charge your phone.

Nissan sells the battery packs in Japan for 170,500 yen (about $1,170). That might sound like a lot, but it's actually not bad for a super high-capacity battery pack. Each of Nissan's current-gen battery modules is 1.67 kWh, which converts to 112 Ah (112,000 mAh). Assuming a 20% loss in capacity, two of them would have enough juice to charge the largest current iPhone more than 40 times.

Nissan has been selling the Leaf since 2010, giving it a big head start compared to Ford, GM, and others. Nissan was even out ahead of Tesla until 2020 when ramped-up Tesla production finally made the Model 3 the all-time best-selling electric vehicle. The Leaf is cheaper, slower, and (usually) has less range than Tesla vehicles, but it's still toting around a lot of energy. The latest models have 40-62 kWh batteries, depending on the model. That's a lot of potentially recyclable batteries. Nissan has not yet announced plans to sell its refurbished EV power stations outside of Japan.