Scenes from the trade war:

• In response to Donald Trump’s huge tariffs on Chinese exports, China’s government has suspended exports of rare earth minerals and magnets, both critical to many modern industries and the military

• Trade talks between the United States and the European Union appear to have gone nowhere, with Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s top trade official, reportedly having “struggled to determine America’s aims.”

In other words, the Chinese, unlike the Trump administration, understand what trade and trade wars are about. And the Trumpers, in addition to not knowing what they’re doing, don’t even know what they want.

Here’s what Trump and his sycophants don’t understand about international trade: It’s not about what you can sell, it’s about what you can buy.

Think for a minute about the finances of individuals. Why do people work? Not to be able to boast that they ran trade surpluses with their employers — “Hey, they paid me a lot, and I hardly bought anything from them.” No, people sell their labor so that they can afford to buy stuff.

The same is true for countries. Importing what you want — being able to get stuff from other countries — is the purpose of international trade. Exporting — sending stuff to other countries — is something we do so we can pay for imports.

OK, in practice there’s a bit more to the story, as I’ll explain below, but the complications don’t change the fundamental proposition that the benefits from international trade basically come from being able to import goods that would be expensive or impossible to produce at home. Think hydroelectric power from Canada.

This fundamental reality explains why serious analyses of Trump’s trade war with China often conclude that China, not America, has the upper hand.

Yesterday the Financial Times had a mostly good writeup of the stakes, which pointed out that US exports to China are “heavily focused on agriculture.” The FT said that these goods are “low value-added,” which I’m not sure is true — U.S. farming is highly productive and highly capital-intensive. But what matters in a trade war is the fact that China can fairly easily find other agricultural suppliers, buying soybeans from Brazil instead of Iowa.

By contrast, the United States will have a hard time replacing many of the goods it imports from China. Furthermore, many of the goods we buy from China are industrial inputs rather than consumer goods.

So Trump has started a trade war that will disrupt our own supply chains. Remember Covid and its immediate aftermath? Remember how shortages spread through the economy and fueled inflation? Those days are about to come back, inflicting especially large damage on the manufacturing sector Trump claims he will revive.

Is the U.S. economy at China’s mercy? No. America remains a highly productive nation that could cope with even severe economic shocks if it had smart, clear-headed leadership. But we don’t.

True, today’s Wall Street Journal has an article with the headline “U.S. Plans to Use Trade Negotiations to Isolate China.” So you might think that there’s an actual strategy out there. But I don’t believe it, for four reasons.

First, this story was clearly leaked by Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, or people close to him. In a normal administration this kind of supposedly inside scoop would offer valuable insights into the policy process. But one thing that’s clear about Trump tariffs is that there is no policy process. Individual officials — Bessent, Peter Navarro, Howard Lutnick — keep floating policy ideas in public, hoping that putting them out there will somehow create facts. But a day or two later another official will go on TV, or Trump will post something on Truth Social, completely contradicting what the last official said.

So what we’re hearing about Bessent isn’t really a scoop about Trump policy, it’s almost surely an attempt by Bessent to influence policy. And there’s no reason to believe that he’s actually in charge.

Second, even if U.S. negotiators are trying to cut deals with other countries that would isolate China, they will be unlikely to succeed because Trump has lost all credibility. After all, you can’t make deals with other countries unless foreign governments believe that you will honor the agreements you make. Trump has already destroyed U.S. credibility on that front, ripping up all our existing trade agreements, then making wild changes in his own tariffs every few days.

Third, even if Trump’s promises were credible, why would a European government want to join America’s trade war with China, destroying its own supply chains? If the argument is that it’s worth paying the cost of ruined supply chains because that will protect you from Trump’s tariffs, who trusts Trump not to reimpose punitive tariffs on our supposed allies the next time he thinks they’re looking at him funny?

Fourth, the Trump administration is bringing a knife to a gun fight.

To the extent that there’s a real plan to confront China, it appears to center on reducing China’s ability to sell abroad. It’s true that this will be painful for China’s export sector. As I said, my flat statement that trade is about imports, not exports, needs some qualification because the short-term interests of exporters can’t be ignored. But China can cope with lost exports by aiding affected industries, the same way Trump funneled money to farmers hurt by his first trade war. It can also offset any loss of export jobs by stimulating domestic demand. Moreover, Xi and the Chinese Communist Party don’t face elections.

So while China can manage the loss of exports in various ways, it will be much harder for America to cope with the loss of crucial inputs produced in China.

The overall point is that even relatively sophisticated Trumpers like Bessent are still thinking in terms of Chinese access to the markets of the United States and our imagined trade war allies, when the real issue now is whether China can strangle the U.S. economy by disrupting our supply chains.

PS: I know that I’m mixing metaphors here — China has brought a gun that is strangling us by cutting our supply chains. But you get my point.

Furthermore, America’s ability to fight a trade war is severely damaged by our descent into authoritarian rule. A few months ago other advanced countries might have been inclined to take our side because of shared democratic values. Now we’ve become a country whose government claims the right to kidnap people whenever it likes and ship them to foreign gulags. Who wants to be allied with such a government? Who will trust such a government to keep its word on anything?

Of course, the fact that the collapse of democracy will contribute to our defeat in the trade war isn’t the main reason to be horrified at where we are. Losing real GDP is bad, but it’s much less important than losing our soul. As it happens, however, we seem to be on track to do both.

MUSICAL CODA

As the stock markets crashed on Friday, April 4, Donald Trump left Washington, D.C. He did not go to New York to consult with Wall Street. He did not go to Dover, Delaware, to receive the bodies of four American servicemen, killed in an accident while serving in Lithuania. Instead, he went to Florida, where he visited his Doral golf resort, which was hosting the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournament, and stayed at his Mar-a-Lago club, where many tournament fans and sponsors were staying too. His private businesses took precedence over the business of the nation.

Many of his guests were also interested in boosting Trump’s personal interests, as well as gaining the American president’s favor. One of them was Yasir al-Rumayyan, who runs the $925 billion Saudi sovereign-wealth fund and is also the chair of the LIV tournament. Other sponsors of the tournament included Riyadh Air, a Saudi airline; Aramco, the Saudi state oil company; and, startlingly, TikTok, the Chinese-owned social-media platform whose fate Trump will personally be deciding, even as he profits from its sponsorship and support.

Once upon a time (and not even that long ago), blatant conflicts of interest, especially involving foreign entities, were something presidents sought to avoid. No previous inhabitant of the White House would have wanted to be seen doing personal business with companies from countries that seek to influence American foreign policy. Such dealings risk violating the Constitution, which prohibits government officials from accepting “gifts, titles or emoluments from foreign governments.” But during Trump’s first term, the court system largely blew off his commercial entanglements. Now he not only does business with foreign as well as domestic companies that have a direct interest in his policies, he advertises and celebrates them. We know the identities of the golf-tournament sponsors not because investigative journalists burrowed deep into secret contracts, but because they appear on official websites and were displayed on a billboard, observed by The New York Times, at his golf course.

Both the website and the billboard would have been scandals in any previous administration. If they are hardly remarked upon now, that’s because Trump’s behavior is a symptom of something much larger. We are living through a revolutionary change, a broad shift away from the transparency and accountability mandated by most modern democracies, and toward the opaque habits and corrupt practices of the autocratic world. For the past decade, American government and business alike have slowly begun to adopt the kleptocratic model pioneered by countries such as Russia and China, where the rulers’ conflicts of interest are simply part of the fabric of the system.

The change began during Trump’s first term—Vice President Mike Pence once made a 180-mile-plus detour on a trip to Ireland, in order to stay at a Trump hotel—but Trump was constrained by his advisers and perhaps by what was then still his fear of legal consequences. This time around, he knows he got away with a series of crimes, including an attempt to overthrow an election. His advisers are supine; he feels no more constraints. New standards were already set in December, when the Trump Organization announced the construction of a Trump Tower in Saudi Arabia, an investment that posed a clear conflict of interest for the president-elect.

Trump’s family also created a cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial, that could, in practice, serve as a vehicle for anyone to pay him indirect bribes. Nobody around him objected. After Trump’s return to office, his administration, unbothered by appearances of impropriety, did indeed quickly suspend a civil investigation into Justin Sun, a Chinese entrepreneur and an adviser to World Liberty Financial, who had also invested at least $75 million in the company. More recently, The Wall Street Journal discovered that executives from Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange, met with Treasury officials to ask for looser oversight, even while they were at the same time negotiating a private business deal with World Liberty Financial. In the past, Binance has been fined $4.3 billion, a record, for letting terrorists, drug traffickers, and people under sanction use its exchange, so the company’s interest in looser oversight is not theoretical.  

In keeping with the new atmosphere, the inauguration itself became an ostentatious display of the new administration’s kleptocratic values. American tech CEOs were the most prominent guests and got the most attention, but several foreign business partners of the Trump Organization also attended inauguration-related events, posed for photos with Trump, and referenced their connections to his presidency in promotional materials. Several lesser-known companies involved in regulatory and other negotiations with the U.S. government quietly donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump’s inauguration. Soon afterward, in a late-night purge, Trump fired 17 inspectors general, all people who were responsible for monitoring corruption and ethical violations inside the government.

Trump isn’t just disregarding old norms for his own sake. He’s making it easier for others to cut corners too. From the beginning of his career, Trump participated enthusiastically in the opaque, offshore world of shell companies and anonymous bank accounts, a milieu that has always attracted autocrats, criminals, and anyone else who seeks to hide their money. As of 2018, more than one out of every five condos in Trump-branded buildings had been purchased by shell companies whose true owner was unknown, and anonymous owners continued to buy into his businesses during his first term as president. Now his administration is helping other businesses that operate in the shadows to stay there. Trump’s Treasury Department announced last month that it would no longer enforce the Corporate Transparency Act, hampering recent congressional efforts to end money laundering, tax dodging, and other lawbreaking by anonymous investors. In an executive order, Trump suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits American and foreign companies from paying bribes to do business. The Department of Justice is also disbanding a task force set up to administer sanctions on Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Oversight will be removed from many domestic financial and government institutions too. Trump ordered a full work stoppage at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been created to protect consumers from manipulation by banks and other financial institutions He has fired top officials overseeing ethics, whistleblower protections, and labor rights, including the heads of the Office of Government Ethics, the Office of Special Counsel, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Meanwhile, Justice Department officials are drafting plans to reduce investigations of fraud and public corruption, which means that prosecuting crooked officials will be more difficult. Cuts to the IRS mean that tax fraud will also be harder to identify and prosecute. Just last week, the Justice Department announced that it would curtail investigations of cryptocurrency fraud and disband its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.

[From the June 2024 issue: The new propaganda war]

One particular Trump backer has already profited from this new world in which conflicts of interest just don’t matter. Elon Musk, who has no mandate other than the personal blessing of the president, now has enormous influence over the very same government institutions that have long subsidized and regulated his companies. Musk slashed jobs at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency that oversees auto safety and crash investigations, including those involving his own electric-vehicle company, Tesla. Musk oversaw mass firings at other regulatory agencies that had launched more than 30 investigations into his companies, which include SpaceX and Neuralink.

At the same time, major government agencies, including the General Services Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration, are using or were considering the use of Starlink, a product of SpaceX. The State Department planned to buy armored Teslas. One Commerce Department official, Evan Feinman, resigned last month because of an administration push to use Starlink to provide rural broadband services. “Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” he said. Musk isn’t breaking the law, and he doesn’t have to say or do anything to encourage these changes. His new role as America’s premiere oligarch means that all kinds of people and agencies will kowtow to him anyway.

Musk has also had real influence over American foreign policy. If they are upheld by courts, DOGE’s cuts to USAID, to the U.S. Institute of Peace, and to U.S.-backed foreign broadcasters, including Voice of America, will all deliver deep blows to American diplomacy and soft power, in addition to the damage they will do to international health care and humanitarian aid. The end of American-funded broadcasting by itself will particularly benefit China, which competes with the U.S. in the realm of narratives and ideas as well as economics. It’s curious that Musk was in a position to make these decisions, all so favorable to Chinese soft power, even though he has important ongoing business relationships in China. His “gigafactory” in Shanghai, opened with hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese loans, has become Tesla’s largest production site.

But in Trump’s administration, outside interests are no big deal. To take one of many examples, FBI Director Kash Patel, during his Senate hearings, revealed that he has accepted $1 million to $5 million in stock as payment from the corporate parent of Shein, a Chinese e-commerce company that has been accused of using forced labor in its supply chain; he told senators that he would not divest. Patel has also consulted for the Czechoslovak Group, a foreign arms conglomerate that J. D. Vance, when he was still a senator, said had “ties to the inner circle of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Although Patel, in his new role, will be responsible for countering Russian and Chinese influence and espionage operations, 51 Senate Republicans nevertheless confirmed him.

But these are only the conflicts of interest we know about. How many people benefited last week from advance knowledge that Trump would reverse his position on tariffs? How many others are making other stock-market bets based on their access to government information? We don’t know the answers, and Trump’s Department of Justice is unlikely to want to find out. We are living in the dark, just as people do in other kleptocracies, and this changes everything.

Earlier this year, I published a book, Autocracy, Inc., which argues that many modern dictatorships are best analyzed not through the prism of ideology but through the political and financial interests of the people who run them. The presence in the American government of so many people, most notably the president, whose financial interests can be directly and immediately affected by their political decisions means that we now need a different way of analyzing American policy too.

To understand Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine, for example, one should ask not merely How will they end the war? and How will they shape America’s relationship to Europe? but Who in Trump’s immediate circle will benefit from the lifting of sanctions? and Have the Russians made explicit financial offers already, and to whom? The rare-minerals deal now being negotiated with Ukraine deserves especially close scrutiny. We need to establish which Americans, exactly, will benefit, and how.

The right question to ask about Trump’s tariff policy is also financial: How will this enormous change to American trade policy benefit Trump? One answer is already clear. The countries and large companies damaged by these tariffs, some of which could face huge losses or even bankruptcy, will have an enormous incentive to play up to the president, to offer him political donations, and maybe even to offer business deals to him, his family, or his friends in order to get some kind of exception made for themselves or their industry.

In a law-abiding administration, personal finances wouldn’t be an important part of the public debate. But this administration’s leaders have decided that laws and norms of behavior that have held for a century or more don’t apply to them. The Republican-led Congress has so far decided not to enforce them either. It’s now up to the media, to outside organizations, and to whistleblowers to keep reporting the slide into kleptocracy to the public and to the courts, to make sure that remaining laws are enforced. It’s up to the Democratic Party to follow the lead of opposition movements in other kleptocracies and to put corruption at the center of their arguments. Before it’s too late, everyone who can do so must communicate what is happening: American government, American foreign policy, and American trade policy are slowly being transformed, not to benefit Americans but to benefit the president, his family, and his friends. Only voters can stop them.

This article was adapted in part from the preface to the paperback edition of Autocracy Inc., which will be published in the United Kingdom in May and in the United States in August.

As we wait to see what fresh hell awaits us this week, one obvious question is, who put these malevolent clowns in power?

The short answer is ignorant people. But political ignorance takes two different forms.

On one side there are “less-engaged” voters who don’t follow politics closely. And to be fair, ordinary Americans have good excuses for not paying close attention to the news: They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. Unfortunately, many of these voters believed Trump’s fabulist promises. They are only now beginning to understand what they voted for.

There’s now a huge debate among Democrats about how to reach less-engaged voters. But that’s a topic for future posts.

But less-engaged voters weren’t the only people who missed the warning signs and supported Donald Trump. Trump also had a number of ultra-wealthy backers, both on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, who are now shocked, shocked to discover that he is who he always was.

Over the weekend Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, suddenly turned on his champion, declaring on X that

by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.

But Ackman refused to take any responsibility for enabling the destruction:

I don't think this was foreseeable. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.

Indeed. Who could have foreseen that the self-proclaimed Tariff Man, who posts crazy stuff on Truth Social every day, would impose destructive tariffs? Who could have imagined that the many economists, myself included, who warned that a Trump victory would be very bad for the economy would turn out to have been right? Or if we were wrong, it was only because we underestimated the damage.

OK, Ackman is a fool, but he wasn’t alone in getting Trump all wrong. Many wealthy people imagined that Trump II would be like Trump I, mostly a standard right-winger with a bit of a protectionist hobby. They thought he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier. They expected him to back off his tariff obsession if the stock market started to fall. If he ripped up the social safety net, well, they don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid.

And if Trump II really had been like Trump I, America’s oligarchs would be very happy right now.

It's also true that successful businessmen often believe that their financial success makes them experts on economic policy even though they haven’t made any effort to understand the issues.

Even relatively sensible business leaders like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase tend to stumble when they try to play economist. Does anyone remember Dimon proclaiming in 2014 that we couldn’t restore full employment because American workers didn’t have the right skills? Five years later the unemployment rate was below 4 percent.

I was struck over the weekend when Elon Musk (I know, I know), seemingly breaking with Trump, called for zero tariffs between the United States and Europe. I think it’s safe to assume that Musk has no idea that trans-Atlantic tariffs were, in fact, close to zero in 2024: The average European Union tariff on U.S. goods was 1.7%, the average U.S. tariff on EU goods was 1.4%.

Finally, great wealth often enables great pettiness. Some readers may remember Wall Street’s “Obama rage”: Financial titans were furious at the president who bailed them out after the global financial crisis because he dared to hint that they had played some role in causing that crisis. Why, he even called them “fat cats!”

The pettiness has been even worse this time around. A few days before the inauguration the Financial Times ran an article titled “Is corporate America going MAGA?” that quoted one “top banker”:

I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.

I wonder how liberated he’s feeling now.

To be honest, I’m actually glad that Trump II is proving to be such a disaster for the economy. If he had exercised some restraint, if he had simply claimed credit for the very good economy Joe Biden left him, many wealthy people would have cheered him on while he destroyed democracy. Now they may turn on him.

But I hope the rest of us have learned a lesson from the oligarchy’s support for Trump, even if it’s now cracking: Extreme wealth inequality has given great power to people who exert a malign influence on our politics.

MUSICAL CODA

The Nissan Leaf should be a legendary vehicle, but it isn’t. That’s sad, given it was the first mass-market EV from a major automaker. Unfortunately, it was hamstrung by limited range and heavy battery degredation, and thus only really appealed to diehard early adopters. These days, there are thousands of old used Leafs on sale for peanuts. But what if an aftermarket battery swap could give them hundreds of miles of range on the cheap?

Besides the sub-100 mile range, there’s not a whole lot wrong with the early Nissan Leafs built from 2010 onwards. In many ways, they’re comfortable, practical cars that cost very little to run. The only problem is that they have tiny batteries that you’d probably need to charge every day. Indeed, it’s for this reason that many early examples are on sale for less than $3,000. Some examples are particularly cheap due to battery degradation that sees them running out of juice after 50 miles or less. Some have batteries that offer no usable range at all.

If you’re up to the challenge, you could grab one of these tired little cars, and swap in a brand-new battery with way more capacity than stock. You could net yourself an EV with over 250 miles of range for less than $10,000. But is the bargain worthwhile?

[Welcome to ‘Some Geniuses,’ our tongue-and-cheek-ishly named series highlighting the coolest car mods out there. If you have any clever car mod suggestions, please email us at tips@theautopian.com!]

Fallen Leaves, On The Ground

The original Nissan Leaf entered production in 2010 for the 2011 model year. The ZE0 generation, as it was known, debuted as a sleek, modern hatchback with a battery slung low in the chassis for tidy packaging and a low center of gravity. It boasted a single traction motor driving the front wheels, good for 107 horsepower, powered by a 24 kWh battery. Tiny in comparison to modern EVs, this decision limited range to just 73 miles according to official EPA figures.

This was no surprise, given the huge expensive of lithium-ion batteries when the Leaf was first released. The automotive market was yet to start building cells at scale, and fitting a larger battery would have been cost prohibitive on an already-expensive vehicle.

As Nissan improved the vehicle’s efficiency and battery size over the years, range improved gradually. The EPA rated 2014 and 2015 models at 84 miles of range due to some changes to the charging strategy and some efficiency improvements. The Japanese automaker would eventually upgrade the Leaf with a 30 kWh pack for the 2016 model year. This boosted range to 107 miles—still weak by modern standards, but better. In the second-generation ZE1 model, Nissan took things further. 2017 saw the introduction of the 40 kWh battery, good for 151 miles of range, while the 2019 model year brought a 62 kWh battery which pushed this figure to 226 miles—far more respectable in this day and age.

Over the years, the early models of the Leaf have depreciated rapidly. Few people are looking to buy an EV with only 73 miles of range, and many examples can barely muster that since their batteries have degraded over time. Most examples with 24 kWh battery packs are sold for well under $5,000 due to their limited appeal. The only thing really holding them back is the battery—swap that out for a larger version, and they’d suddenly be a lot more appealing. As our EIC David Tracy wrote “The First-Generation Nissan Leaf Was One Cooling System Away From Greatness,” referring to the air cooled battery’s severe degradation.

Thanks to Nissan keeping its battery designs relatively similar over the years, this is actually quite possible. A popular swap is to grab a larger battery from a later model to upgrade the earlier cars. The most common route is to purchase a 40 kWh or 62 kWh battery from a wrecked late-model Leaf. However, that’s no longer the only way to go. Now, it’s possible to buy upgrade kits to put brand-new cells into your aging early model Leaf. This is particularly achievable on the Leaf, which never used complicated liquid cooling systems in its battery packs.

A quick search on Google will turn up multiple results for Leaf battery swap kits, covering not only the original Leaf, but later generations, too. Vivne is one of the most visible suppliers, selling  40 kWh, 50 kWh, and 62 kWh packages from its own website. The largest pack offers up to 440 km (273 miles) of range, according to Vivne, and the company has also at times explored larger capacities. The company produces replacement battery modules using cells manufactured by Chinese supplier CATL. Vivne sells upgrades in two formats. You can either buy a set of battery modules to swap in to your original Nissan Leaf battery housing, or you can buy a complete plug-and-play battery pack that has had the fresh cells already swapped in. The latter is the more expensive route, but it’s easier and more convenient for those who don’t want to disassemble a whole battery pack.

Vivne is not the only supplier in this space, just the most visible. Yaste Tech also offers replacement packs for 2011 to 2020 Nissan Leafs in 53 kWh and 63 kWh capacities. Packs can also be readily found on sites like Alibaba from suppliers like Chuneng Energy and Aoyouji Energy Electronics in varying capacities up to 62 kWh. Prices range from $5000 to $8000 depending on capacity and whether you’re buying modules or a complete pack.

Of course, swapping in the battery itself is just part of the equation. If you have a particularly early Leaf from 2011 or 2012, you may need an adapter for the earlier version of battery control ports these vehicles used. From 2013 onwards, battery packs across models will plug in fine, but there can be issues getting the vehicle to report the correct range and state of charge for the battery. To solve this problem, you’ll need something called a “CAN Bridge” which sits in between the battery and the vehicle and translates messages between the two to get both on the same page. Normally, this is best sourced from the battery upgrade supplier to ensure it works with your replacement pack and your target swap vehicle. Reflashing the battery management system or other software changes can be necessary in some cases; replacement battery suppliers are generally the best resource on what precisely is required to make their cells work in a given vehicle.

There are also size issues to consider when upgrading to a larger pack. When swapping in a used Leaf 62 kWh Leaf pack, one must fabricate or source spacers to allow it to sit lower in the vehicle, as it’s physically taller than the earlier, smaller capacity packs. The same goes for these Chinese packs and module swaps. If you’re swapping the new modules in to a Leaf housing yourself, you’ll have to install a rubber spacer between the top and bottom plates to make room for the beefier cells. If you’re buying a preassembled 62 kWh pack from China, this will have been done for you. Vivne explains how this is done in one of their own videos. Plenty of sealant is lathered on to ensure the rubber seal is bonded to the original battery housing. It’s a somewhat crude solution, but necessary to fit higher capacity batteries. We’d be interesting to see how it survives in a wet or snowy climate.

Installation is easiest with a lift and a large battery jack.

Sealing methods for the embiggened pack are rather basic.

There are some challenges and risks involved with this sort of work. To achieve a swap like this, you need to be able to remove and replace your Leaf’s heavy battery pack without accidentally crushing yourself in the process. It’s best achieved with a proper lift, but DIY jobs are possible with some ingenuity. You also need to take the proper precautions to avoid electrocution from the high voltages inside the battery. Generally, if you’re diligent, wear the right protective gear, and can follow instructions carefully, you should be okay—but this is not an area to cut corners or mess around.

Traditionally, when swapping in a used 62kW Leaf battery to an earlier model, it’s necessary to replace the springs in the suspension to keep ride height correct. This is important because Nissan’s 62 kWh battery weighs 903 pounds, versus just 601 pounds for the original 24 kWh unit. However, some suppliers like Vivne sidestep this due to their packs being lighter—with their 62 kWh pack being just 188 pounds heavier than the 24 kWh unit.

In a commuter test, Vivne tester Cora Liu got approximately 215 miles out of a 62 kWh battery in temperatures from 32 to 57 F. 

Real Experience

These swaps are still relatively new, having gained prominence over the last year or so. Stories of success or failure are still thin on the ground. However, I was able to get in touch with Ryan James, who executed one of these swaps on his own. He gave me the low-down on what it took to pull this off. Having started his swap journey in early 2024, he’s been one of the first to document what it was like to swap fresh Chinese batteries into an old Nissan Leaf.

Ryan started with a 2015 Nissan Leaf with a badly-degraded battery, showing just 60 miles of maximum range when charged. It was the perfect candidate for a fresh battery, and he found one via Alibaba. “I sourced it through Chu Energy,” he explains. “The total cost was around $6,000 USD… $4,500 of it was the battery and then $1,500 was the shipping.”

There were some initial teething problems from the start. “The project took a long time from order to completion,” notes Ryan. “The first CAN bridge they sent caused the car to have errors, so they replaced it and we were able to proceed with the battery upgrade after that.” Once the correct CAN bridge had arrived to go with the rest of the supplies, Ryan was able to pursue the actual installation.

Once the right gear arrived after many months, he elected to perform a DIY install at home. “I did follow my original plan, which was lifting the car on jack stands and lowering the battery with a small ATV jack and a second jack to balance it,” he explains. “I lowered it on to 4 small wood furniture dollies and pulled it to the side of the car to work on.”

It then took a further few days to get the old batteries out of the pack housing and the new modules swapped in. “Putting the new battery modules and internals was relatively easy, but tedious process,” he explains. “[It] was slowed down by a mix of unclear instructions and sometimes having the seller amend instructions through chat.” It’s a daunting experience, but the support was there to help Ryan get the project over the line. It took some doing, but careful attention to detail got the modules in and the pack upgrade completed.

With the pack installed, Ryan’s Leaf had far greater range than before. “I’d say it can comfortably get up to 200 miles on a full charge, probably 200 plus if driven lightly or drained very low,” he says. “Previously it got around 30 miles, with the guessometer saying 55.” By and large, the car seems to display a relatively good prediction of its new range. ” I personally did a test not long after completing the install and it initially performed fairly well… I did a mix of higher speed freeway driving and city and got 184 miles,” says Ryan. “The guessometer still had 18 miles left, where it initially started with 224.”

The new battery seems to do what it says on the tin. “It does seem to have the advertised capacity, since after my test I charged it nearly 50 kWh,” he explains. “My ordered battery was 62 kWh, so when accounting for the remaining charge and any unusable buffer it seems right in my uneducated opinion.” Thus far, he’s only had one minor issue while driving. “My wife did have an issue with it one day when it went down to 19 miles,” he says. “She was traveling uphill at freeway speed, when she states it went turtle mode and then completely lost acceleration.” However, the problem was soon rectified. “She stopped and after a few minutes and restarted the car, then she said it just worked normal,” he explains. “This has been a one off incident, and I suspect it is CAN bridge related.”

Overall, Ryan is pleased with his purchase. “My daughter has been using it daily since early January, plus occasional family use as well,” he explains. “We have really enjoyed having the new battery and it has been working great for us.”

Ryan’s story is just one anecdote; there are a handful of others out there across Facebook and forums. General reports are that the replacement batteries do the job, boosting range up to 220 to 280 miles when going with the larger 62 kWh packs. Small issues around CAN bridges and the finicky work of swapping modules into a pack are common, too. The one thing still lacking at this stage is long-term performance data. These swaps are still new enough that we don’t have 1, 2, or 5 year reports yet. nor have many drivers put thousands of miles on their new batteries. Still, I was able to speak to one more owner who has completed the swap, and he’s racked up a full 8,000 miles to boot. That’s some driving!

I was also able to speak to Daniel Rykiert, who ordered a 68 kWh Vivne battery swap all the way down to Australia. It didn’t come cheap, at a touch under $15,000 AUD (~$9,500 USD), but the benefit was a neat and easy install that was literally plug and play. “The installation was very easy as there were only 3 cables from the battery to the car and 12 large bolts holding the battery to the frame of the vehicle,” explained Daniel. “Once installed you reset the cars computer as the battery pairs with the vehicle and off you go.”

There have been some minor teething issues at higher temperatures. “I haven’t had any major issues with the battery just a few technical issues that are being worked on by Vivne,” Daniel explains. “These include when the battery temperature goes above 42°C the power to motor is limited and seems to flutter on and off, but this only occurred if I fast charge for extended periods of time over 45 minutes.” But overall, in over 8,000 miles (13,000 km) of driving, the battery has held up well. “I haven’t done an official range test, but it would do 390 km (242 miles) [on the highway], around town is 450 km (280 miles),” Daniel says. Huge figures for a Nissan Leaf, to be sure.

First of Its Kind

The Leaf is an interesting case when it comes to battery swaps; seldom few electric vehicles are getting the same attention from the aftermarket or DIY-minded individuals. With used examples being so cheap, they could become particularly appealing now that there is a cheap (if risky) way to turn them into longer-range EVs. The short legs were always the biggest weakness of the model, and there’s now a straightforward way to fix that—if you’re willing to invest the money.

[Ed Note: I just want to make it clear that there are dangerous associated with DIY’ing high-voltage battery packs, and with purchasing such batteries from insufficiently-vetted sellers. That is all. -DT]. 

The question is whether the Leaf will remain unique in this regard. There are plenty of older EVs out there now, but most had longer range than the Leaf from the factory. While they might still be good candidates for fresh batteries when their original packs wear out, there might not be the same demand for extended-range packs for these models, since they weren’t so lacking in the first place.

In any case, as the population of EVs in the world continues to grow, we’ll see more and more of this kind of thing. Motor swaps and battery swaps will become the new way to chase performance in the way that engine swaps and aspiration upgrades were in years past. The times, they are a-changing.

Image credits: Facebook via screenshot, Ryan James (supplied), Nissan, VIVNE-Cora Liu via YouTube screenshot

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