Hi everyone,

Thanks for accepting me to the forum - it's been very helpful!

I am based in the UK and 5 months ago I got a 2012 M35H with 100k miles. The car seemed to have been maintained quite well and I am happy with it - powerful, lot's of extras, and efficient for 370 hp (I'm getting 8 to 10 l per 100 km depending on style of driving). I also bought it at a bargain price.

My biggest concern when buying it was the hybrid battery and the potential for it to breakdown. This has, thankfully, not happened, but I did read that as it ages/goes through more cycles with driving, its capacity to hold charge deteriorates. In my car, there have been 22k miles done just on electric, which I thought was quite impressive.

Anyways, in case the lithium ion battery breaks down, I know a new one would cost ~8-10k USD, which is unsustainable. I recently came across a salvaged lithium ion battery from a car with only 8k miles. It costs a fraction of the price of a new one and I am thinking whether or not to do a 'preventive' replacement and replace my hybrid battery with one which, I'm hoping, is in a much better state. Hopefully that might increase the resell value of the car, too.

Has anyone done that and do you have any opinions? Any owners with M35H's with 120k+ 150k+ miles?

Thank you very much!

Shouldn't be any problem with that, as long as you're sure there's no collision damage to the JY unit. It's likely the LBC in the used battery will need to be programmed to the car, so I think I'd let a dealer do the swap.

Thanks for the reply!
I will contact the Nissan dealer in London to see if they'd be willing to do a swap with a used/salvaged hybrid battery. Has anyone found a way to do any diagnostics/tests on the hybrid battery to see whether it's in a good state? The last time I went to Nissan for something else I asked about the hybrid battery - they said they don't do diagnostics and I'll get a warning light if it has any problems. For me, swapping with a 'fresher' one means I could potentially get more mileage on electric.

immber wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 21, 2022 2:25 am

The last time I went to Nissan for something else I asked about the hybrid battery - they said they don't do diagnostics and I'll get a warning light if it has any problems.

That's ridiculous, every Nissan and Infiniti dealer has a mandatory Consult3+ on site that can pull codes from every system in your car. They may not have a hybrid-certified technician, that's a different story. That shouldn't stop them from running a code sheet for you, only from performing repair work on the high-voltage system.

Update: contacted the Nissan dealer and they said they are no longer doing these 'swaps'. They said they had 2 cases where a customer had purchased a salvaged hybrid battery, but it was so degraded because it was out of its host vehicle for a long time, that it would not accept charge or would not accept recoding to the new vehicle. In both cases it ended up costing the customer a lot of money.
The battery I am looking at has been out of its host vehicle for ~2.5 - 4 years (my estimate).

The dealer is right, that could be bad. Deep discharge of a high-voltage battery is sometimes unrecoverable and will definitely cause capacity loss. If you find one that's arrived at the JY recently (say, within 6 months) then there shouldn't be issues. When I replied earlier I didn't realize you were looking at something so old.

I didn't either to be fair, I only asked the seller after the dealer mentioned it!