Thanks for the info. :)
We bought one tonight. I let the salesman upsell me to the SV model, so I paid an extra $2100 for it. Still, I was at $15,500 (after $7500 tax rebate) for a brand new car. It’s a great price. We got interest free financing for six years instead of five, which was nice.
I went back and forth about getting the upgrade, but there are some nice things about that I think I would regret not having if I keep the car for as long as I hope to keep it. It came with the faster charger as standard, included Nissan Connect, which lets you do fun stuff with your smartphone or tablet, such as turn on the heater or AC remotely so the car is heated or cooled when you climb in, and also had some upgrades such as LED headlights, built-in Nav system, a larger LCD screen to display the NAV map and to also display the rear camera view for backing up, and the thing that really sold, a hybrid heating/cooling system.
The standard model uses electric heating and cooling. The SV uses a heat-pump system for heating and cooling, so it uses less energy to heat and cool and shouldn’t pump out that really dry heat the electric heating seems to do.
The SV also has six speakers instead of four, and nicer upholstery. Is it worth the extra $2100? I think so. I like the enhanced charger (available as an upgrade option for the standard model) and I’m hopeful that the hybrid heating/cooling system will save me a tiny bit on energy costs and get more range in the cold and hot weather months over the electric heating and cooling system.
Tomorrow is a day of discovery as I will drive around and try to figure out the dashboard displays and begin learning how to game my range in the car.
23K for an SV before tax incentives is insane. Truecar.com link for that confignot even including some of your options. $28k showing here. Around $30k if you include quick charge and that package.
Can you buy me one? It’ll probably be cheaper to ship it down to Florida then to try to go to a dealer here. :P
Also, pictures please. We would like some photos, inside and out. :) Or at least one.
What if you want to take a road trip? Are there enough charging stations along the US interstates to make that feasible?
Probably not for this car if it’s a long trip. If it’s something where we need one charge there may be options. The issue is not just the availability of a charging station, but whether it’s the 4-hour charge or the 30 minute charger. If our destination has either we’re good, but if the charging station is on the way it will need to offer the 30-minute charge to be feasible.
Elon Musk is building charging stations, but they’ll only work for the Teslas. :(
For us it’s a second car and it’s for driving around town. It should be fine for that. There are nearby charging stations and all the Nissan dealers have free charging and most have that 30-minute charger. There’s a Welsh pub a few blocks from us with free charging for customers and I work next to a BMW dealer with a charging station. I believe this dealer charges $1.50/hour. I should be able to go from 25% battery to 100% battery in a few hours there while I’m at work. One of the nice things about the Nissan Connect telemetrics is it will email me when the car is charged or reaches whatever charge threshold I assigned so I can walk over and get the car.
I will try. I’m not much of a picture guy. I will need to host the photos somewhere to link them here, right?
This is the car.
http://www.bommaritonissan.com/new/Nissan/2015-Nissan-LEAF-5b1e8b220a0a00de470069dc088ade0d.htm
It’s still up on the dealer’s site. We got it for a bit less than the listed price there. We got it for about $23,000, and then we will get the $7500 tax rebate when we file in January.
I have not owned a car for nearly six years and I haven’t purchased a new car since the late '90’s. This is fun stuff for me. Besides, it’s like a toy car! It runs on batteries!
congrats and from what most owners of the leaf say, you’ll enjoy it. And your using it right, a perfect second car for local commutes, and it will save you bucks over it’s life (Electric cars are very cheap to service, running costs in terms of ‘fuel’ can be next to nothing and you get all the tax-rebate deals on road tax etc). Enjoy the silence, the acceleration and being ‘green’ in terms of your CO2 output :)
Look around for a ‘Leaf owners’ forum for the usa (i use one for the Zoe in the uk) as that can be a very handy place for info.
That sounds like a pretty awesome buy, Mark!
So, my main car is giving out on me, time for something new. I do a daily back and forth to work of approximately 50 km (each way), and there are free charging stations at work. With the ridiculously cheap price of electricity here, on average the annual cost to charge an electric car is roughly $450 Cnd for annual mileage of 25,000 km (not factoring in free charging at work), so that’s a no-brainer - my monthly fuel cost for the current car is about $400/month. Government subsidies kick in $8,000 off the price of a new vehicle, so the average financing cost for a Volt or the new Ford is about $520/month on 60 month term.
My biggest concern is real-life conditions. It gets bloody cold here in the winter, so how much range am I going to lose for heating? If I take the Volt as an example, it gets roughly 80km off a charge. With my 1 way commute being 50 km, am I at risk of falling short? Anyone have any hands-on experience with this?
not hands-on, but by all accounts electric cars do lose a fair bit of their range in cold weather (somewhere around 10-15% i’ve seen mentioned) anyway, and using the heater is an additional drain.
I don’t know the Volt especially well but if you were doing that drive in a Zoe or Leaf (with around 120km-150km ranges) you would be fine, also keep in mind if your route is very mountainous, steep inclines also tax the battery more etc.
The commute itself is fairly flat. From what I can see, the Volt has a gas generator to extend the range from 80km, if the Leaf can do 120km that’s well within my comfort zone. 10-15% loss for cold weather is ok, but I guess I’ll need to talk to a local dealer to fully understand cold weather performance.
I’m losing significant range with my 2015 Leaf in the cold. My Leaf is rated at 84 miles per full charge. I’m guessing in the cold I’m getting closer to 65-70, though I have limited data so far.
Mark, is that with heating on? From your estimate, 65 mile = 104 km, that would be perfect for me.
The old Leaf used power straight from the battery to run the heater, so it made a big difference over the winter months to range, i think the new Leaf has the heat-pump-convertor thing that the Renault Zoe has, so that should be less of a concern. Renault and Nissan have been working together for a couple of years with their electric cars, sharing tech etc, and it why the new models coming from both will have much improved range.
But tolwyn, you definitely should do the research on the volt range and cold weather, go beyond talking to the dealer (as often with electric cars the dealers know very little (surprisingly!) detail) search for forums of Volt owners and see what they are talking about etc.
I’m leaning more towards the 2016 Leaf, but the Volt has the gas generator, so that would alleviate the range issues more or less completely. The only part about the Leaf that has me hedging is range anxiety. I niggle over these things, that would be a pretty big adjustment for my headspace.
Yeah the range anxiety is an issue. My car gets roughly 100km… after the low fuel warning light comes on.
I love the look of the new Volt but i still think the manufacturers have missed the mark. Chevrolet insists it is an electric car but its really a plug in hybrid. After the battery runs out it is a regular car with full performance and range. So when the battery is on, you’re hauling around a full size engine. When the battery is dead you’re hauling around a full EV. The engine also directly drives the wheels so you are carrying around a transmission, alternator, radiator and everything else.
Comes across a bit negative, I’m actually considering the Volt myself, just saying that I would trade more range with less gas horsepower.
I don’t run the heater much, but it is a heat pump heater, which is supposed to use less energy. I do use the heated seats and heated steering wheel. The heated seats are very nice.
You also need to drive these cars differently. Slower is better. Brake as little as possible. Drive in the economy mode that regenerates the battery by gently braking when coasting. The trick is to anticipate stops early enough to coast to a near stop and brake very little. Of course you might irritate drivers behind you so you have to pick your moments.
You’ll also feel better if you can trickle-charge it overnight at home so it’s near full-charge in the morning if you need to put 50+ miles a day on it. I don’t have that yet but we will get it put in soon. Trickle-charging is not fast. I’m not even sure it will go from 0 to 100% in 8 hours. It might take 12. However, most of the time you won’t be close to 0 when you plug in at night. To get a level 2 charger (the 4 hour charger) would cost anywhere from $400 to maybe $800, plus paying someone to install it. I don’t see any huge benefit from it right now. If we ever trade in our gas-powered car and have two EVs it would probably be worth investing in one.
I love the car but the range is significant limitation. We don’t need that much range, however. I may only get 60 miles of range when it’s really cold out. I haven’t had it long enough to really figure it out, but the other day I used up 60% of the charge and got about 36 miles out of that. I did use the defrost for a good 10 minutes as well.
They are increasing the range every year or two. Nissan has hinted at a 150-200 mile range for the Leaf by 2018. It’s hard to know when to buy or lease these cars. We got a great deal so we went ahead and purchased, but I may very well trade it in on a new one in a couple of years to get one with more range. The dealer has a program where we can keep the same car payment when we trade in.
Good information, thanks. We have free charging at work, so most of it would be done there. They also subsidize the cost of installing a 240v charging station at home.
My understanding of the Volt was the gas engine was simply a generator to recharge the batteries, hence no additional legacy overhead i.e. Radiator, transmission, etc?