Musings of the reality of electric car ownership.
Bought a used Nissan Leaf for the wife less than 2 weeks ago, and it has been a fairly big disappointment in terms of both cost and range. Before buying, I had done just a bit of sniffing around online, saw the published range of 84 miles, and found reports of hardcore enthusiasts ("hypermilers") getting 100 miles per charge. My wife has a short commute, and used car prices are in the gutter, thus voila!--Leaf in the driveway.
I've been collecting data, and it looks like we get about 3 miles per kw-h, though Nissan marketing seems to think we should be getting 4.7, and the car itself is lying and saying we're averaging 4.2 (maybe Nissan hired some VW software guys?). So with my electric rates, I figure I'll be paying about 10 cents a mile for electricity. Much better than the 30 cents my big sedan costs, but not as good as I expected with the touted "115mpge" on the Nissan banners...which beg for clarification: The 115mpge claim is PURELY a statement on energy efficiency and NOT related to energy cost. It ignores the fact that gasoline costs 1/4th as much as my electricity for the same amount of energy. (#thewholetruth)
Here's a big surprise, if you actually read the owner's manual: For greatest battery longevity, you want to keep the battery between 20% and 80% charged. Poof! There goes 40% of your range. Add in a little age-related battery degradation (even though the car says "full bars" capacity), and losses with using the AC, and we "should" have a useful range of at least 40 miles, depending on the kind of driving, which is truly laughable.
The reality is we're getting about 32 miles between charges.
So that kind of sucks, and the real problem is with how amazingly weight-inefficient batteries are (or how amazingly energy-dense gasoline is). The Tesla P85D is named for it's battery capacity, at 85kw-h. A gallon of gasoline has 33kw-h of energy...yes, that's right: A 1200 lbs Tesla battery holds less energy than 3 gallons of gasoline.
The saving grace of course is how efficient electric cars are. Gas engines waste over 3/4 of the energy to heat. But still....we're left with a Nissan Leaf with over 600lbs of battery and only 32 miles of range. That's why, I think, depreciation is so big on this car; a lot of owners finding out how inconvenient/impossible it is having one of these as a daily driver, like a guy I know at work, who now leaves his Leaf at home and rides the train in. Good for us I guess, as we get to buy a good car on the cheap and still only need to charge it once a week.
On the "pros" list, the Leaf is quite impressive with the technology. Nav system, aux port, bluetooth, Smartphone controls, online interface, backup camera, LED lights (f'ing bright!). And the big plus: Much less maintenance. No more oil changes, plugs, wires, transmissions, fuel systems, leaky gaskets etc. With 4 other cars on the road it'll be nice to have a set of wheels that won't need much lovin'. This will take the sting out of that eventual $5k battery pack replacement.
I still think this was a good investment for us, given that we had to buy a car. It's just not as good a buy as I thought it would be. Think twice before cutting the pipeline.
