4Runner just lost daily driver duties

[paddlenbike]

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.



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.