Question about 3 year old spark ev

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evboy

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 12, 2015
Messages
198
I never buy new cars, and usually buy cars that are at least 3 to 6 years old. We are coming up on 3 years old for the 2014 spark ev. I didnt plan on buying, because i had no place to service it in NV, but now that the Bolt will be in all 50 states, I should have no problem taking it to the dealership here.

My question is how reliable is the 2014 spark ev. consumer reports has trashed used leafs and tesla cars. they dont have enough sparks for CR to comment so im asking u guys. What do u think about buying a 3 year old spark ev next year. will it be reliable like a corolla or problematic like a mercedes. how does the a123 battery compare to the lg that is in the 2015. pros and cons. Thanks for the advice..
 
Try to find a dealer/broker who shops the off-lease auctions and will sell to you for a small markup.

A new one is around $12k after the $7500 tax credit, and the cheapest 2014 in the nation on Autotrader is $9888, so I wouldn't touch a used one with a ten foot pole unless it's considerably cheaper than I've been seeing.

Like you, I'm not in the three state sales area. I almost bought a 5000 mile 2015 for $11.6k in Wisconsin in August, now I'm willing to travel for a deal if I can lease a new one for that much plus 1% interest.
 
Over a year ago I bought a used '14 Spark EV with 3.5k miles on it.
It now has ~24k miles on it.
It has not hiccuped once during that time !

THE one and only issue I have seen is the climate control pop-down header display RARELY doesn't respond to changes to the climate controls. The controls work as commanded, (fan speed, etc.). A power down reboot at the next stop light always gets it working correctly.

I recently took it into my local Chevy dealer for the Brake Light and Air Bag SW updates.
I talked to this dealer before buying the Spark EV. The Service Manager said it would be no problem doing warranty maintenance. There is hardly no routine maintenance!
I was told that any dealer that works on Volts can work on a Spark EV. That was never an issue.

As far as the '14 battery pack, I'm still gathering data points to plot degradation. It's just dozens of pics on my phone that I take when I am getting a big charge, >50%.
I can tell you I don't see any changes in the daily Guess O Meter display. I still occasionally see 90 miles range displayed.

And during that ~21k miles I spent about $35 charging at home during the dead of winter. I wanted to be nice to battery pack during very cold weather.
The rest of the time I only used Free Public charging, so this car gets less expensive every day I drive it!
 
My question is how reliable is the 2014 spark ev.

I can't speak for all of them, but mine never went back to the dealer for anything in 3 years. Well, that's not true...it went back to the dealer yesterday, one day short of 3 years to turn it in at the end of the lease. :( Then I picked up a new one and bought it this time instead of leasing. :lol:

As for the battery, all I can say is that I didn't experience any noticeable degradation in range after 3 years, but mine was treated fairly gently. I rarely charged to 100%, only got below 10% a handful of times, and only put 18k miles on it. My understanding is that the 2014s had a larger unused buffer built into the pack than the later ones, so it would allow more degradation before you'd see it.
 
evboy said:
My question is how reliable is the 2014 spark ev. consumer reports has trashed used leafs and tesla cars. they dont have enough sparks for CR to comment so im asking u guys. What do u think about buying a 3 year old spark ev next year. will it be reliable like a corolla or problematic like a mercedes. how does the a123 battery compare to the lg that is in the 2015. pros and cons. Thanks for the advice..
I bought my used 2014 Spark EV 2LT last August. It was like new and only had 1500 miles on it at the time of purchase. It now has 7200 miles on the ODO. This year I started gathering battery capacity and full charge GOM range data. I drive exclusively in L and recharge to 100% when the GOM gets to ~50%. I do not have the quick charge option so all charging is done using my Bosch L2 EVSE.

The linear trendline for my calculated battery capacity data for 46 charging sessions over the last 7 months shows my battery has degraded about 0.5 kWh. The linear trendline for this same period of time for my GOM range after a full charge shows an average of 105 miles with no indication of any degradation.

Mechanically, I have not had any problems and all recalls have been completed. I should point out that almost all of my driving is local, around town with very little freeway driving although many roads I drive on are posted for 55 MPH. Driving in L maximizes the regeneration function and, I believe, gives me the higher GOM full-charge range values. I should also point out that I do use the AC in hot weather. I use the AUTO function and set the cabin temperature to 75 deg. F. I note this because a large portion of the data I have was gathered during hot weather here in Central California.

To say I am very pleased with this car is an understatement. This car is GREAT as is my 2015 Spark EV 2LT.
 
evboy said:
but now that the Bolt will be in all 50 states, I should have no problem taking it to the dealership here.
Before buying SparkEV (or any used car), you should find a dealer near you that can service the car. EV isn't like gas cars where a monkey wrench and hammer may do (which I recently used on F350); much of EV work is with computers, and they need specialized knowledge. But many dealers who can service Volt should be able to (or willing to) service SparkEV. You just have to make sure to find one that does before actually buying the car.

While few commenters here give glowing reviews of SparkEV reliability, there have been some troubling issues. They are mainly from people who just got the car, so it's not known if that's only for early issue, and may not apply to longer term. Still, you have to make sure the dealer can service the car at the very least for warranty issues.

As for battery, my 2015 still shows 18.1 kWh, pretty much the same as when new (maybe 0.3 kWh down). This is with hundreds of DCFC sessions and often letting it sit out in 100F+ degree heat. Only thing I don't do is to charge to 100%. From few other comments here, 2014 would hold up just as well.

But remember, A123 no longer makes the battery, and that could be an issue if you plan to keep it 7+ years; carmakers are obligated for 10 years to provide parts, but no more after. LG cells in 2015+ may or may not be the same as in Volt, but because the chemistry is the same (ie, same cell voltage), there is a possibility to rebuild after 8+ years. A123 cell voltage is different.

Finally, I asked the dealer how much it'd cost to replace the battery on 2015. They had to call few places and finally came with a quote: $35K. Yes, it's $10K more than the MSRP of the car. While it's not known if the price will go down in the future, keep in mind that dead battery out of warranty without a way to rebuild will be pretty much junked car.
 
SparkevBlogspot said:
Finally, I asked the dealer how much it'd cost to replace the battery on 2015. They had to call few places and finally came with a quote: $35K. Yes, it's $10K more than the MSRP of the car. While it's not known if the price will go down in the future, keep in mind that dead battery out of warranty without a way to rebuild will be pretty much junked car.

This is probably the biggest unknown and one which could significantly impact all EV sales if the battery replacement cost does not get reasonable. Or - is an EV destined to become the first "throw away" car?
 
MrDRMorgan said:
Or - is an EV destined to become the first "throw away" car?
It's not just EV, but hybrids as well. The reason I got SparkEV is due to dead battery on Prius; dealer quoted $3600, but used cars of similar vintage sell for cheaper than that. They also guarantee only for 1 year even though the battery is new as opposed to 10 years for new car.

I called around many places to get rebuilt batteries, and many who used to deal with rebuilt batteries no longer do so due to unreliability. Few places that "guarantee" sounded shady. Few places that sell for really cheap (like $700) was like playing Russian roulette with the car; will the battery catch fire due to some crap they did? Even if one can find a decent battery deal, one also has to worry about aging gas engine, and it's simply not worth it.

I suspect much of today's "popular EV" like Leaf will be thrown away (no battery cooling, way too slow and boring), like Gen1 Prius you hardly see today. Not sure about SparkEV, though due to being the first GM EV that you can own as well as being the quickest in price range. If you're a young kid and you have a choice of used EV for cheap, it'd be SparkEV; hopefully, some of those kids will find a way to revive the battery, and LG would be easier than A123.
 
MrDRMorgan said:
This is probably the biggest unknown and one which could significantly impact all EV sales if the battery replacement cost does not get reasonable. Or - is an EV destined to become the first "throw away" car?

Anybody can just go into a dealer and order a new Prius high voltage battery, about $3800 for 1.6kWh, or $2500 with trade-in. That's no worse than replacing the transmission in a regular gas engined car. (plenty of older cars go to the scrapyard when the engine or transmission fails and the car isn't worth fixing)
And there are plenty of private suppliers of 'rebuilt' batteries, which are old batteries with the dead cells swapped out with other old cells.

If a 18kWh battery is worth 10x as much as a 1.6kWh battery, then SparkevBlogspot's $35k price quote sounds frighteningly possible, and we're left with salvaging batteries from totaled cars until they all die of old age.
Anybody know how durable the batteries are in a crash situation? Is there a good chance a battery surviving a frame damage crash? It happens all the time with lead acid starting batteries.

Worst case scenario, GM supplies no new batteries, supplies rebuilds until the warranty end date on the last SparkEV sold, and by 2030 all our batteries are at least 14 years old. Under that scenario, I think the cars would be pretty much useless by 2035.
 
Battery isn't like transmission. You can't replace bad cells with "good" cells and have it working reliably; there will be stress points which will lead to more breakdowns. This is one reason why some shops got out of rebuilt battery business for Prius. For LiIon, poorly rebuilt batteries could be really dangerous.

Rebuilding SparkEV battery is more involved than Prius battery due to different chemistry (3.2V for A123, 3.7V for LG), cooling complexity, cell balancers (could've caused the problem in the first place) and maybe more. There's no car using A123 other than 2014 SparkEV and old Fisker (maybe new Fisker, too); they are very rare to find, more so in the future. If Volt cells are same form factor as 2015+ SparkEV, it may be possible to rebuild using much more abundant wrecked Volt batteries.

As for wrecks, battery is under rear seats and back, so frontal crash may save the battery. Even rear crash that did not crunch into battery under rear seats could be usable. But given how rare SparkEV is, I wouldn't count on that.

I just don't see SparkEV lasting beyond battery life unless some kids experiment with latest battery available as a hobby.
 
SparkevBlogspot said:
Battery isn't like transmission. You can't replace bad cells with "good" cells and have it working reliably; there will be stress points which will lead to more breakdowns. This is one reason why some shops got out of rebuilt battery business for Prius. For LiIon, poorly rebuilt batteries could be really dangerous.

Rebuilding SparkEV battery is more involved than Prius battery due to different chemistry (3.2V for A123, 3.7V for LG), cooling complexity, cell balancers (could've caused the problem in the first place) and maybe more. There's no car using A123 other than 2014 SparkEV and old Fisker (maybe new Fisker, too); they are very rare to find, more so in the future. If Volt cells are same form factor as 2015+ SparkEV, it may be possible to rebuild using much more abundant wrecked Volt batteries.

As for wrecks, battery is under rear seats and back, so frontal crash may save the battery. Even rear crash that did not crunch into battery under rear seats could be usable. But given how rare SparkEV is, I wouldn't count on that.

I just don't see SparkEV lasting beyond battery life unless some kids experiment with latest battery available as a hobby.

We also need to keep in mind that only 7032 Spark EVs have been sold in the USA since 2013 (Inside EVs sales data) and most of these are probably in California.
 
I'm sure the overwhelming majority are in California.
A week ago one dealer in CA, Dublin Chevrolet, had 61 new SparkEV in stock, which is approximately the same as the total dealer inventories of Maryland and Oregon combined.

Last week Dublin sold 25 of those, which is double the total September sales of the other two states.

EDIT: I just had a thought on battery pricing:
If a Spark battery is worth $35k, does that mean a Bolt battery is worth $100k?
While it's entirely possible the Spark is selling at a loss even at MSRP, I don't think they're selling Bolts for $70,000 less than a Bolt battery is worth.
 
Taxman said:
I'm sure the overwhelming majority are in California.
A week ago one dealer in CA, Dublin Chevrolet, had 61 new SparkEV in stock, which is approximately the same as the total dealer inventories of Maryland and Oregon combined.

Last week Dublin sold 25 of those, which is double the total September sales of the other two states.

EDIT: I just had a thought on battery pricing:
If a Spark battery is worth $35k, does that mean a Bolt battery is worth $100k?
While it's entirely possible the Spark is selling at a loss even at MSRP, I don't think they're selling Bolts for $70,000 less than a Bolt battery is worth.

I only live 45 miles from Dublin Chevrolet so I keep an eye on what is going on there. Just recently, I have seen the price of a new 2016 Spark EV drop as low as $19743 although it is back up now. By far, they are moving more Spark EVs than anybody else in the area. By the end of October I expect all new Spark EVs will be gone. The used market per CarGurus.com looks to be dropping in price. Some good deals are going to be available.
 
My 2014 is close to 32,000 miles, I charge it to 100% every day (plug it in everytime it is in the garage) and run it down to to < 20 miles of range
frequently. It does a 70 mile R/T commute up a big hill like a champ. I might have treated it more gingerly if it wasn't a lease but with its limited range it doesn't make sense in my case to reduce that range even further by limiting charging and discharging to some fraction of it's usable capacity.

I have only fast charged it maybe a dozen times, mostly because overnight charging in the garage meets 95% of my needs.

It's been rock solid reliable, my range is still 90+ indicated and I continue to average 5 mi/kWh. Even the stock tires lasted 30k miles. WIth the network of DCFC stations in Southern California I think it would have a long and useful life even if its range dropped by 25%.
 
sparkyps said:
My 2014 is close to 32,000 miles, I charge it to 100% every day (plug it in everytime it is in the garage) and run it down to to < 20 miles of range
Have you measured the battery capacity when new, and what is it now?

I recently measured my 2015 at 18 kWh after 1.5 years. Seeing how it was about 18 kWh in the beginning (though didn't measure as accurately), I see virtually no change, which doesn't seem right. And I used DCFC gazillion times.

sparkyps said:
my range is still 90+ indicated and I continue to average 5 mi/kWh. Even the stock tires lasted 30k miles. WIth the network of DCFC stations in Southern California I think it would have a long and useful life even if its range dropped by 25%.
Assuming the worst case of 90 miles and 5 mi/kWh, that would imply 18 kWh. Since usable on new 2014 was about 19 kWh, it seems you lost 1 kWh, or 1/21.3=5% capacity. If you had it for almost 3 years, that would be about 1.6% per year. Not too bad.
 
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