Driving Electric – One Year In

One year ago, I brought home a new 2023 Nissan Leaf. I didn’t really need a car, but changing rules around tax credits meant that I pretty much had to buy the Leaf last fall if I wanted to save $7500. It was my first new car in a decade, and I’m mostly glad I bought it.

Quick Thoughts

The Leaf is fun to drive. Compared to my pokey 2013 CX-5 with its anemic 155 horsepower, the Leaf accelerates like a jet on afterburner. While the CX-5 feels a bit more stable on the highway at 80mph, the Leaf is an awesome city car — merging onto highways is a blast.

That said, the car isn’t without its annoyances.

• The nominal 160 mile range is a bit too short for comfort, even for my limited driving needs; turning on the A/C (or worse, the defroster) shaves ~5-10% of miles off.
• When the car is off, you cannot see the current charge level and predicted range unless you have the key and “start” the car. (While plugged in, three lights indicate the approximate charge progress.)
• My Wallbox L2 charger has thrice tripped the 30A breaker, even when I lower the Wallbox limit to 27 amps.
• The back seat is pretty small– while technically seating 3, I’d never put more than 2 kids back there for a ride of any length, and even my 10yo is likely to “graduate” to the front seat before long.
• The trunk is surprisingly large though. I only need the CX-5 for long road trips, 5+ passengers, or when I’ve got a ladder or a dog to move.

Miles and Power

In my first year, I’ve put 6475 miles on my Leaf, with 1469kWh coming from my Wallbox L2 wall charger (~6.4kWh/h), perhaps 120kWh from the slow 120V charger (1.8kWh/h), and 6kWh from a 40kWh/h DC charger, for a total of 1595kWh of electricity.

This represents almost exactly 40 “fillups” of the 40kWh battery (though I rarely charged to over 90%), and an energy cost of somewhere around $150 for the year. (My actual cost is somewhat harder to measure, since I now have solar panels). By way of comparison, my CX-5 real-world driving is ~28mpg, and the 231 gallons of gas I would have used would’ve cost me around $700.

One of the big shortcomings for the Leaf is that it uses the standards-war loser CHAdeMO fast-charger standard, which means that fast-chargers are few and far between. Without a fast charger (which would allow a full fill-up in about an hour), taking roadtrips beyond 80 miles is a dicey proposition.

For most of the year, I had thought that Austin only had two CHAdeMO chargers (one at each of the malls) but it turns out that there are quite a few more on the ChargePoint network, including one at the Austin Airport. Having said that, my one trial of that fast charger cost a bit more than the equivalent in gasoline — I spent $3.74 to fill 6kW (~27 miles) in 17 minutes, at a pace that was around half what the charger should be able to attain– annoying because the charger bills pay-per-minute rather than by kWh. But it’s nice to know that maybe I could use the Leaf for a road trip with careful planning.

Conclusions

I like the Leaf, I like the price I paid for it, and I like that it’s better for the environment. That said, if I were to buy an electric today, it’d almost certainly be a Tesla Model Y.

In a year or two, it’s possible that I’ll swap the Leaf for a more robust electric SUV, or that I’ll trade the Mazda up for a plug-in hybrid.

-Eric