4Runner just lost daily driver duties

Some of you may remember how my last daily driver car worked out. It didn't. My goal was to buy an inexpensive older car with cheap registration and insurance, and drive it. Not surprisingly, the car was a ton of work, the gas mileage was actually worse than the 4Runner for my daily short trips to the park and ride, and the whole deal turned into a huge waste of time and money. When it finally blew a headgasket or whatever it did, I dumped it.

This time around, I decided to get a brand new, cheap car. Most electric cars are leased rather than bought, and that is what I did as well. You caught the electric vehicle part, didn't you? I shouldn't be spending much time or money on oil changes, replacing headgaskets or putting on new exhaust systems.

Got a mid-line model Nissan Leaf SV. It has some cool features like proximity lock/unlock, navigation that shows how far you can go and where to find charging stations, ability to program charge times for off peak charging, remote telematics that allows pre-heating/cooling the interior of the car by your smartphone, heated seats front and rear and even a heated steering wheel! We added one option to our car, the LED headlights (they're much better than the halogen and they use far less power, and let's face it, I will buy anything that even looks like an LED) and a quickcharge port that lets you charge the car from empty to full in under 30 minutes.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-9...af_4Runner.jpg

So far, it's awesome. It gets 129 miles per gallon equivalent, is really quick and fun to drive, and amazingly quiet. It's not attractive, I sort of feel like I need a license plate frame that says "my other car isn't this lame." But it's cheap to drive...like a Prius costs 2.5X more to drive than this thing.

Now down to cost. I got this one for $210 a month. Because it's electric, my parking pass for work drops from $185 to $0. I can charge for free at work and they just installed a 12-port charging station 150 feet from where my wife works. Fuel savings alone will approach the lease cost. I can hog the carpool lane with the Prius's and I can drive like I'm entitled or something because I'm destroying the environment slightly less than others around me. We'll see how this works out, as we are still considered early adopters, at this point. But so far, it's great.

The wife is working today, so I snuck the car into her spot to take a picture. Shhh...don't tell her.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-M...f_4Runner2.jpg

Congratulations! What kind of range do you anticipate?

Doesn't look half bad but I think you should make that "my other car isn't nearly this lame" quote a bumper sticker. I think many people who have a second economy car might be interested lol

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My friend at work had a leaf when they first came out, but sold it about a year later. He liked it except that the range started going down faster than what nissan advertised and he got pissed about nissan's reaction. He seemed to think that the heat in AZ killed the batteries but that a CA car would probably do better.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by slomatt

Congratulations! What kind of range do you anticipate?

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Right now it's averaging 4.1 kilowatts per mile and it has a 24 kilowatt battery, so if you used every bit of battery capacity it would go 98.4 miles. My friends have all been hammering on it so I expect that figure to improve. 70-75 miles is considered the safe highway range and 100 miles is typical in city driving. The city mileage is shocking--I drove around for an hour running errands and it took 20 minutes to drop 1 mile off the range indicator. The regen braking is really effective.

Steve--last year Nissan upped the warranty on the batteries. There are 12 bars on the dash display to indicate total capacity (not charge, but battery capacity), and once the third bar disappears, you get a new one. The only battery replacements Nissan has ever had to do have been in Arizona, so yes, the heat isn't good for long term life. Really cold temperatures reduce range too. Temperate places like California, Oregon and Washington have ideal climates for EVs. And btw, all these things are why you lease instead of buy. The technology will only get better.

Right now it's in the work parking garage taking on a free tank of electrons. It's fun to check the car's charging status on my phone and it texts me when it's done charging so I can make the charger available to others.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-D...U/s640/app.jpg