Added a Leaf to the fleet

Picked up a new 2013 Leaf SV with every option available (quick charge, premium package, and other stuff I don't care about) yesterday. Drove it to work today and so far I love it. I wasn't planning on buying one, but it was just too cool for the price. I also eagerly await my Tesla X in the coming years.

I am definitely going to take out that stupid pedestrian warning noise maker, but otherwise I love it.

So far I don't think I need an L2 charger, but I might get one before the year end to claim the tax credits.

 

The Leaf's trimmings definitely feel nicer than the Prius. But I am not comparing apples to apples since it is considerably more expensive than the 2013 C we recently bought and considerably newer than the 2006 Prius we have. The Leaf is a a heck of a deal, especially with incentives. I get an additional $6K ontop of the $7.5K federal for being in Colorado, but then have to pay an extra $50 for registration! Why not just give me $5950? Oh well.

I've driven them and help build them for a while, but the itch got too large to ignore. I couldn't wait for the Tesla and the Leaf is essentially the only good EV on the market today. All the other EV-only vehicles on the road I find to drive like crap when I tried them. The Leaf seriously impressed me.

I actually drove it in ECO mode for a good 15 miles during the test drive before I realized it had defaulted to ECO. In ECO it felt like the other cars and nothing more than a large glorified golf cart. I took it out of ECO and was able to screech the tires and zip around to the point I think I visibly frightened the salesperson.

I still call my Leaf my golf cart, but it is my awesome little golf cart. Almost all the things I love about the Prius are included on the Leaf.

So far my complaints:

The hatch is hard to close. I believe this is because the rubber grommet feet on the hatch are actually so close to the actual travel of the door, that you have to squish the rubber to get the hatch to close. I surmise that over time the rubber will wear out and then it will work fine. I might just take a heat gun to it or shave it a bit. There is also a slight rattle in the hatch, but to be fair my Prius has a rattle too. In the Prius a screw from the license plate holder fell into the hatch and now makes maracas sounds every time it is opened and closed. The Leaf has something similar but faint and only sometimes. I think it is a loose screw, but I don't want to tear it apart yet.

The SKS in the Leaf is not as nice as the SKS on the Toyotas. All of our Toyota/Lexus SKS vehicles unlock by just putting your hand in the handle. On the Leaf you actually have to touch the button which I now find really annoying. I realize this is silly to be annoyed about, but Toyota hit the nail on the head and the Nissan implementation makes me wanting more. Also compared to the Prius with a lock on the hatch, the Leaf should really have an SKS lock button on the hatch. Our RX450h also does not have a hatch lock button, but on the Prius I would always use the hatch lock. Get out of the car, get bags from the back hatch, close and press the button. Now I have to close the hatch, then go back to a front door to press the button and back again. I realize there is a button on my fob but the only time I ever use those is when I am at an arena and trying to find my car by making it beep...

I also wish there was a way to turn on the climate control with the car off from inside the cabin, on the keychain, or something else physical instead of having to use the internet. It is cool, but takes a little while longer. For instance today it is -8 outside, but when I got to work I plugged in and turned on the climate control inside to 72. Note that I currently have several tens of thousands of dollars of highly sensitive instrumentation in the vehicle and they cannot get that cold so the climate control is pretty cool.

 

Well they start at $29K before any incentives for the low end base model. They call that the "S'. Then there is the "SV" and "SL".

The SV has navigation, CARWINGs (the internet control through an always connected cell data stream), 16in rims (ugly though) and the 6.6KW onboard charger instead of the 3.3KW onboard charger. Starts at $32K

The SL then has less ugly 17in wheels, the quick charge CHAdeMO port, Automatic LED headlights, and fog lights. This starts at $35K.

You can then add bits of pieces of packages to the cars. So for this SV I got, I got one with added Automatic LED headlights, fog lights, and the CHAdeMO port. So basically I got an SL with the exception that my wheels are the 16in wheels and uglier. But I didn't like the 17in anyways and come summer time I will be putting on some real 17in wheels.

I then also added the "premium package" which is the 360 degree view, uses 4 cameras mounted around the car, and then the upgraded Bose sound system which sound OK, but not excellent like the Lexus system by Mark Levinson.

With the added destination charge Nissan charges on all Leafs, the dealer fees and crap, a waxing package (free carwashes for life, and the dealer is on my commute and then free hand waxing for 6 months), stupid things like mudflaps and floormats, tax, title charges, registration fees, etc, it came out to $34.5K which is a few thousand off. Not a stellar deal, but whatever. If I build one with the same specs on Nissan's website it comes to an MSRP of $35,665. But then add $2800 in tax and close to $500 in registration fees, and $500 in dealer crap, it would come out to about $40K. So I got essentially $5.5K off the price and I got the top of the line model essentially.

Then I will get $7500 back federally and $6000 back from the state which comes to $21K.

I am debating whether or not to get a charger. The L1 charger it comes with is pretty much all I need. But when my Tesla comes, I want at least 1 L2 charger so I can swap between the 2 in which case charge time becomes more important since it is now a shared resource. And this year I can get 60% off the cost of the charger from tax incentives which may or may not be carried into next year... Just like how the 6.6KW or even the 65K CHAdeMO port on the car are not really needed for me since I am charging at 1.5KW L1.

My average has been 4.1 miles per KWh which is 244W/mi which I find respectable. My pack has never really been cold though since in the garage it is plugged in and the garage is heated and when plugged in outside now in the -8 temperatures, the inside heater is on and the charger is trickle charging at the same time so the battery is constantly being poked slightly keeping the temps normal. It is nice to step into a car that has been parked outside in a snowy blizzard and there is no snow on the car at all so I don't have to scrape ice off anything and the inside cabin is toasty warm and the car is fully charged!

 

I think that's a bit of a false question. If you are charging from near empty, you should really have an L2 charger. L1 is more of a constant top up or trickle charge, not really meant to get it charged up from empty to full every day. But the lowest I have had it down is about 25%. It had 12 hours to charge back up and it was in the mid 80's %-age. But also once you get to 80%, it takes much longer to charge up if you have it on the 100% charge setting and not the 80% long life setting.

With $21.5K for a used with 7K miles, I feel better about my price. But either way it is an outstanding deal and if you don't qualify for the tax refunds then you get a better deal doing it that way.

Glad I am not alone in this regard. I would think that the majority of Leaf buyers are coming from some sort of hybrid and today in the US that means almost always a Toyota branded hybrid of some sort. Maybe I can wrestle a Toyota handle behind the Leaf and interface to the SKS system...

It is a dream to drive for sure. In my case it does come out cheaper since my electricity is so cheap everywhere if I buy retail, free from solar, and free from around town. But for the most part I didn't buy it for financial savings. I am not sure why so many of the reporters out there are still so fascinated by payback time for HV's, PHEV's, and EV's but don't care about the payback of an M5 versus the normal 5 series BMW or things like that.

Ah very cool. I will have to check this out later today. Thanks!


And today I drove it on sheets of ice, we had snow, then freezing rain, then snow, then freezing rain, repeat all yesterday so there is literally 1.5" thick sheet of ice covering all side streets. Leaf handled well. I even tried turning the VSC off via the button and was able to whip it about for some fun.

These tires do stink though compared to the real tires I put on my Prius in the winter. I might have to swap them out for some Michelin X-ICE III tires and some winter rims.

 

Made the 100 mile club... Although I really shouldn't have lol. This was Dec. 7th. It was the first time I took the Leaf to the gym but I had been using it all day. What I didn't realize is that the gym was 22 miles from this house. When I left I had 40 miles range left which sounds fantastic until I get to the gym and I have 16 miles of range left, I am 22 miles from my house, no way to charge at the gym, it is -17C outside, 3am, and the kicker is that the final 2 miles to my house is a few thousand feet vertical climb up a mountain pass on the front range of the Rocky Mountains!

Took these pics after my heart stopped racing in the garage when I got home. The car does everything it can to prevent stupid and tell you what's happening. You get the low battery alert around 15% or so. When it thinks you can't make your GPS waypoint, it tells you to find a charging station and maps them for you. When you get down to about 5 miles of range left, the dash lights up with all sorts of error symbols telling you that you should really stop being stupid and plug in. The battery percent indicator stops showing a number and just goes to "--- %" which is not comforting at all, the distance to dead gauge just shows three dash marks as well. The vehicle energy info screen on the MFD shows four asterisks (instead of three dashed lines) for range remaining and stops trying to calculate how much further you can go without climate control on!

The car is a beast, the driver is an idiot for putting it through this, but it made it. I drove at about 20mph to 30mph using gravity and extreme hypermilling techniques I learned with Prius driving but the result is outstanding. A car with a 70mile range went 104.8miles, all but the last 22 of which had the climate control and defrost on in temperatures of -17 degrees with snow and ice on the ground even to make the rolling resistance even higher.

 

And thankyou milesmutt for the information about the back hatch nipple button for the SKS. I now use that regularly. I still dislike how the doors don't just unlock with the hand in the handle and you have to press the button, but if that's my biggest complaint about a vehicle I think that is pretty good.