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I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

jeffgeerling.com

121–130 of 683 posts

Re: I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

#121
post #5

You should never purchase EVs, only lease them. That's what I did. This saves you from the terrible depreciation they have. The only time it makes sense to buy an EV is if it's used. Edit: He bought used.

Datapoint: once in a century pandemic event where car prices spiked and crashed back 2 years later

Re: I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't really follow the secondhand EV market, but it seems to me firsthand buyers are still taking on considerable risk due to the range situation. People who have bought them abroad are sometimes advised to keep the battery between 20%-80-90% full. Following this advice, one person I know told me if they drive like they did their old car they have to recharge after roughly 170 miles, which is super annoying for them…

I keep the car at 20-80% when at home and driving around the city, I charge once a week. Before a trip, I let it charge to 100%, then charge to 80% on the trip (otherwise you waste time on the slow parts of the charge cycle). It's really not a hassle at all. What's a hassle right now is finding a charger, as there aren't enough fast ones along the trip, but I've had the car for a year and have never needed to do a tr…

Just to clarify, the hassle is needing mutiple recharges on a longish trip, not urban driving. The regret is due to unmet expectations based on advertised range as opposed to pratical range.

Re: I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

#123
post #9
post #5

You should never purchase EVs, only lease them. That's what I did. This saves you from the terrible depreciation they have. The only time it makes sense to buy an EV is if it's used. Edit: He bought used.

He bought a used EV. The cost of depreciation is borne by the previous owner.

He paid 17k and it's still a long way to zero.

Re: I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

#124
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really old. Funny, how 2 years old car is really old. For combustion engines, old is like 15+? EVs will have the same problems as mobile phones. Maybe manufactures want that. But software will define the age of your car and I don’t like it. What if the car requires internet connection and the company dies?

For practical purposes it is a 15 year old design; it had a minor update 8 years ago, but was not brought up to date with the norms of the time (in particular, the passively cooled battery). This was the very first mass-market electric car, with only minor tweaks. It's not surprising that it's a bit rough around the edges. That's part of why they're cheap second-hand (along with the fact that the 3rd gen, which actua…

I don't think that we can use the general "old" here. The statement should have been more explicit and include the design of the battery.

If the model gets even minor updates, manufacturing is happening right now, the car is either good enough or new enough in general, and we cannot use old as negative quality.

Electric motors existed before the combustion engine, and people keep talking about "rapidly evolving area", while the only thing that is rapidly evolving and specific to EVs is the power source. A battery, to be precise. It is all about battery, and nothing else.

Re: I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep the car at 20-80% when at home and driving around the city, I charge once a week. Before a trip, I let it charge to 100%, then charge to 80% on the trip (otherwise you waste time on the slow parts of the charge cycle). It's really not a hassle at all. What's a hassle right now is finding a charger, as there aren't enough fast ones along the trip, but I've had the car for a year and have never needed to do a tr…

Just to clarify, the hassle is needing mutiple recharges on a longish trip, not urban driving. The regret is due to unmet expectations based on advertised range as opposed to pratical range.

No, I know, I was just kind of detailing the general experience. Urban driving is entirely seamless (I exclusively charge at home), long trips are the only slightly inconvenient bit, but I ~never do those.

Re: I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

#126
As European it really struck me how poor the second hand ev market must be in the US. For the “cheap second hand car to do short distances” we have a lot of options really cheap - older gen Renault Zoe and Peugeot e208s, leafs, even the old hyundai Ioniq which is a bit of a cult favourite for its efficiency

Re: I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't really follow the secondhand EV market, but it seems to me firsthand buyers are still taking on considerable risk due to the range situation. People who have bought them abroad are sometimes advised to keep the battery between 20%-80-90% full. Following this advice, one person I know told me if they drive like they did their old car they have to recharge after roughly 170 miles, which is super annoying for them…

I've driven an EV on 500 mile trips. Getting out and stretching your legs for 20-25 minutes once every three hours isn't "super annoying." If all I did was drive around all day, every day for 500 miles at a stretch, it might be, but not nearly as annoying as routinely driving for 500 miles. For most people, the vast majority of their driving takes place well within the range of the typical BEV and range anxiety is a…

This is tiring. Not everyone lives in the suburbs with a plug at ground level and getting out and stretching your legs is great when you choose where you do it but not when you do it in the queue for charging...

Re: I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

#128
post #92
post #33

Nice, we did the same recently. The choice was 2016 100k km Golf Plus for 16k eur 2020 50k km e-Golf for 13k eur I'm so glad we picked the e-golf! It's so fast and nice to drive and cheap to run. Only downside is the limited range (200km on a summer day) but even my commute (100km one-way) is OK as I can charge at work and home. That said, we still have a Touran for when we need to drive further or with lots of lugga…

If that were me then for that much money I'd just buy a used Tesla Model 3

A used tesla model 3 in the Netherlands is upwards of 20k euro, so quite a different price bracket.

Re: I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

#129

Electric Vehicle Man on Youtube did a review of a 2000 pound second hand Renault Zoe that he picked up a few weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEvwtxGeVpQ The second hand market for EVs is getting pretty interesting. There are lots of EV owners that are replacing their EVs every few years and because of all the growth over the last 10 years, there are now quite a few fairly nice EVs on the second hand market…

Don't really follow the secondhand EV market, but it seems to me firsthand buyers are still taking on considerable risk due to the range situation. People who have bought them abroad are sometimes advised to keep the battery between 20%-80-90% full. Following this advice, one person I know told me if they drive like they did their old car they have to recharge after roughly 170 miles, which is super annoying for them…

I did a 6500 mile ev road trip and battery capacity means next to nothing. All that matters is the charging curve between 3% and 60%. Literally all other variables disappear over a road trip.

Re: I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't really follow the secondhand EV market, but it seems to me firsthand buyers are still taking on considerable risk due to the range situation. People who have bought them abroad are sometimes advised to keep the battery between 20%-80-90% full. Following this advice, one person I know told me if they drive like they did their old car they have to recharge after roughly 170 miles, which is super annoying for them…

I've driven an EV on 500 mile trips. Getting out and stretching your legs for 20-25 minutes once every three hours isn't "super annoying." If all I did was drive around all day, every day for 500 miles at a stretch, it might be, but not nearly as annoying as routinely driving for 500 miles. For most people, the vast majority of their driving takes place well within the range of the typical BEV and range anxiety is a…

>Getting out and stretching your legs for 20-25 minutes once every three hours isn't "super annoying."

Nothing done by choice is annoying obviously. But a lot of people are fine with stretching their legs on a five minute bathroom break. Adding an extra an hour or hour half for unwanted stops due to forced recharging is what annoys them.

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