Junkyard Find: Nissan Leafpocalypse in California
When a new car model hits showrooms, you can assume an average of 10-15 years before it begins showing up in quantity at the big American self-service car graveyards (unless it's especially badly built and/or unable to retain resale value, e.g., early Hyundai Excel , Chrysler 200 ). The Nissan Leaf first hit our streets as a 2011 model , thus making it the first EV to be reasonably easy— or at least possible — to find at your local Ewe Pullet . Here's a quintet of first-generation Leafs (Leaves?) at a San Francisco Bay Area boneyard .
When a new car model hits showrooms, you can assume an average of 10-15 years before it begins showing up in quantity at the big American self-service car graveyards (unless it's especially badly built and/or unable to retain resale value, e.g., early Hyundai Excel, Chrysler 200). The Nissan Leaf first hit our streets as a 2011 model, thus making it the first EV to be reasonably easy— or at least possible— to find at your local Ewe Pullet. Here's a quintet of first-generation Leafs (Leaves?) at a San Francisco Bay Area boneyard.
I'm going to use Leafs as the plural here, since yinz seem to hate Leaves and LEAF is the sort of maddening acronym much beloved by the Japanese car industry (it stands for Leading Environmentally-Friendly Affordable Family Car). I'm not going to capitalize it, because I refuse to go along with clever annoying use of capitalization and/or punctuation marks forced on us by automotive industry marketing suits.
I've been documenting electric cars in junkyards for about a decade. The first were converted gasoline vehicles fitted out with lead-acid battery packs ( a Chevy Sprint, a Geo Metro and a Ford Ranger).
Then some of the early golf-cart-esque electric LSVs that sold in California during the mid-to-late 2000s began showing up in the Pick-n-Pulls of the Golden State. I spotted a pair of France-built ZENN Electrics in 2017.
Since nearly all of the GM EV1s ever made got crushed by The General and the Tesla Roadster is too collectible to end up going to a wrecking yard with the words "Pick" or "Pull" in its name, you'd think that the earliest mass-produced, non-lead-acid-battery-powered EV of the modern era that I'd find in such a facility would be either a Leaf or a Mitsubishi i-MiEV. Not so! Two years ago, I spotted this discarded first-gen Toyota RAV4 EV near John Steinbeck's birthplace. These cars had NiMH batteries and were sold/leased in California from 1997 through 2002 (only fleet buyers could get them for 1997-2001).
The first junked Leaf I wrote about was a first-year model I found at a yard near Sacramento in 2022, which had a VIN ending in 0006xx and was thus one of the very first Leafs ever built for the North American market (it also managed to get off the assembly line a few weeks before the Fukushima reactor meltdowns scrambled the Japanese car industry for many months). I think Leafs would have appeared in California junkyards earlier than they did had it not been for the Covid-19 pandemic, which pushed up the resale value of low-range EVs to households seeking cheap third and fourth errand-mobiles that solo drivers could use in the HOV lanes on many Golden State highways.
All that said, I've had junkyard inventory alerts set up for Leafs for years and unwrecked ones have been rare… until the last couple of months. An onslaught of first-gen (2011-2017) Leafs just hit the rows at Northern California Pick-n-Pulls. At the time of this writing, PnP online inventory shows 22 of them in NorCal, plus one apiece in Georgia and Florida.
The Newark yard has these five right now, while the San Jose yard (which, by the way, has one of the best taco trucks in the San Francisco Bay Area in its parking lot) boast10 Leafs for your parts-pulling pleasure.
Located on the Nimitz Freeway (yes, that Nimitz Freeway, where I learned how dangerously slow the VW Rabbit diesel was during my driver-training classes) just between the Newark and North San Jose Pick-n-Pulls is the Tesla Factory, so there's some important EV history in the region.
The former location of Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer made notorious by the right-wing talk radio ecosystem for receiving grants from the Obama Administration and then going bankrupt, is located nearby as well. Lots of green technology history on the East Bay side of Silicon Valley! I haven't lived in the East Bay since 2010, but I came of driving age there and I get back frequently to visit friends, family and junkyards.
I reviewed the 2014 Leaf, more than a decade ago, and took it to this very same junkyard. During that visit, I photographed a 1975 Plymouth Voyager, a 1982 Ford Fairmont two-door and a 1991 Chrysler Imperial. I was able to look up the VIN of my press loaner Leaf and, sadly, it doesn't match any of the cars in today's post.
This group includes two 2011s, one 2012, one 2013 and one 2014. The '11s and '12 were built at the venerable Oppama Plant in Yokosuka, while the '13 and '14 were born in Smyrna, Tennessee. 
A couple of these cars are very dusty inside, with weeds growing past the door weatherstripping, but the other three look pretty nice inside.
The black '11 was built during the chaotic month after the 2011 earthquake/tsunami disaster. Yokosuka is better than 200 miles south of Fukushima, but the tsunami and reactor meltdowns made manufacturing logistics difficult for the entire country.
If I had to guess the reason for so many Leafs showing up together at facilities owned by the same corporation, I'd say that they saved up a bunch until it was worth extracting all the batteries from all of them at once. That would make processing and monetizing them easier.
The moss growing on this '11 suggests long-term outdoor storage.
It's also possible that they were dealership trade-ins with bad batteries. Good replacement batteries for these cars aren't cheap.
I suspect that an ugly first-gen Leaf with a good battery pack would make a great deal on a commuter car in California, since the generous junkyard parts availability in that state means that you can swap in good body and interior parts and get a nice-looking driver that costs peanuts to operate. Those in regions that didn't see strong EV sales until the 2020s will need to wait a while to take advantage of this One Weird Trick, though.
It must have been fun building the filthy gas-powered devices used in this TV commercial.
I was hoping the JDM first-gen Leaf commercials would be more frantic than this.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
Nissan Leaf in California wrecking yard.
[Images: The Author]
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