a 2013 Leaf for the woodgeeks

The wife and I commute in opposite directions, me into Philly on the train, her to the exurbs by car.

We have a new-ish Mazda5 microvan for family roadtrips, and an 11 yo high-mileage Camry, which was her previous commuter car, now retired to 'second car' status. Commuting in the Mazda is a gas-guzzler.

We just traded in the Camry for a Nissan Leaf lease. It will be her new commuter.

Looks like this:



Nissan's 'teaser' lease rate is $199/mo, $2k down, 3 years, 36k miles (about what she does commuting). With taxes and upgrades, we got out of there for $240/mo.

I ran a whole spreadsheet for this....the most attractive part is the >$5000 net savings in fuel costs over 36k miles, more than half the monthly cost. Factor in depreciation and anticipated repairs in the other cars, and the monthly cost of ownership is ~$60/mo.

And it should save ~21 tons of CO2 by 2017, run on 100% wind power coming in at $0.124/kWh.

Will provide user review later....

Haven't gotten to drive it yet myself, but the quiet ride is very nice. Your sense of speed on the freeway is all skewed. Going 65 and it feels like you are driving through the neighborhood at 25.

The 5 is the low-end offering, and gets a low-end engine, not Mazda's super eff engine. She was getting 21.5 mpg on her back country commute. Better than a minivan, but not much.

Agree on the lease thing....we are buy and drive into ground people. The EV issue makes for the difference. I'm not too worried about the battery croaking in <10 years, but I figure the tech will be a lot better/cheaper in 3-5 years than now.

We also didn't really know how we would like it in hard use....a 3 year 'experiment' is easier than buying one that loses a lot of value as soon as it drives off the lot. Maybe we will want a PHEV later... Right now, the idea of paying for and dragging around a big gas generator for the occasional trip does not appeal...but then we already have a 'first vehicle' for road trips.

The Leaf comes with a 1.3 kW Level 1 charger with a 120V plug and 20' cord. Keep in mind that the Battery has a 24 kWh capacity, and gets 3-4 mi/kWh. So, the spouse will use ~10 kWh on her 32 mile commute, 8 hours to recharge on the L1 charger. Ok but not great.

I DID buy a 32A 240V Level 2 charger, which connected to the 6 kW on board charger in the Leaf can recharge from 0% in 4 hours. When she gets home from work, depleted 10 kWh, it is topped off in ~90 minutes. Better. I got a Bosch model from Amazon, ran about $500 and will install it myself on a #8AWG, 40A breaker branch. Short run from the box. The Nissan dealer would find me a charger and installer, but it would've run ~$2k. No thanks.

The model we got also has the 'Quick Charge' option (aka Level 3), a separate plug that runs off a 50 kW DC station. Those stations are pretty rare (and too expensive for home use, about $15k), but charge 0-80% in ~20 minutes. At that charge speed, they don't go over 80% SOC to protect the battery. If they put a few on I-95, I could drive the whole NE corridor. As it is, NYC and Washington DC are too far (100 and 150 mi respectively), unless we stopped a few hours once along the way (no thanks). As it is, its our Philly Metro runabout.

It has a tone generator which goes for low speed forward travel. Hard to describe. It also beeps when it backs up....not as loud as a truck.

. I would like the sounds to be customizable....and wanted the forward one to be 'vroom vroom'.

We put >100k miles on our used 2003 Camry, lots of great memories, but really not a great car. The automatic tran shifted really rough, skidded out on starts if you hit too much gas, no traction control (of course, given the vintage), couldn't climb our driveway in the winter....

Everyone is all about safety....and I guess I feel that the traction control + ABS brakes + 6 airbags, all common in current cars, is safer than none of the above + 1 airbag.

The Leaf tests out very well in crash tests.

We get some nice rain events here (got 5.5" over several hours a couple weeks ago), so the wife asked me about 'wading'...i.e. shorting out the Leaf....I looked it up, and it is designed to have a greater wading depth than most gasmobiles. I said if she saw another car (not a Land Rover ) driving through without stalling, she was good to go.

According to EV forums...there is a ~10% difference between energy from grid and recoverable energy in battery. I would guess that a good portion of that is unavoidable (thermodynamic) losses in the battery chemical reaction.

Nissan bills the on board charger I have as 6.6 kW, but battery energy goes up closer to 6 kWh per h, or maybe a little less.

Correct....there is a US, Japan and European super-charger 'standard', called 'Chademo'. Tesla will not allow Chademo cars (basically all non Tesla EVs) to charge at their tesla supercharger stations, but is planning to sell adapters for their cars to use Chademo chargers.

Aaaah, the efficiency of capitalism....we will have at least two DC charging networks.

Right now, these companies are struggling with the different turnpike authorities, and the NJT has told Tesla that they will not provide their land for use with 'proprietary' charging stations....

Nissan is **trying** to get things started by putting Chademo stations at select Nissan dealerships. There are three such in Philly Metro.

mellow said:

By looking at carstations.com it looks like most Nissan dealers here in MD have a chademo charging station now.

This reminds me of DVD burner wars, see which format wins out.

Click to expand...

Indeed. There are plenty of fastchargers if we go to DC, but right now there are squat between Wilmington DE and Baltimore, 74 miles on I-95, which is pretty 'iffy' range wise (prob more like ~65 miles at 70 mph). In the other direction, a similar 90 miles from Warminster PA Chademo to NYC area.

No EV roadtrips for a little while. On the bright side a one hour L2 stop along the way would prob do the trick, but there is also a dearth of L2's along 95 in both areas.

AC does deplete the main battery, but the cabin heater is much worse (resistance heater is lower COP, and more BTUs needed). For this reason all Leafs come with heated front and rear seats and heated steering wheel standard! That is, there is a cabin heater, but they figure folks will be sparing with it. AC should be ok. The fancy trims model year 2013 and after have a ASHP cabin heater to alleviate this problem.

I got the base model trim, so no HP on wheels for me.

Where2 said:

How much vehicle space would hauling your Bosch L2 charger take up? An enterprising campground chain could allow you to plugin your L2 charger into a 50A RV outlet for 2-4hrs with no infrastructure upgrades. They already have a parking space and a power pedestal with 50A service in many cases, as long as you came with a L2 charger outfitted with an appropriate plug.

Next you'll need a hotel chain with charging stations or power pedestals.

Click to expand...

I likey. L2 charger is certainly portable, and could be pigtailed to an RV plug. As a non-Rv'er, anyone wanna guess how friendly a typical RV park will be to me pulling in for a 2 hour, 13 kWh pit stop on the 240V? Would they do it for $5?