EV's look like EV's because they don't have the same constraints on space that ICEV's do. There is no engine in the front/back, no water pump, no oil pump, no water cooled radiator, no starter motor... so on so on. There's also a great big battery under the floor pan and no gas tank.
They are also heavier, so need different set ups in order to handle decently.
* Limiting the number of QCs (Quick Charges / DC Fast Charge), as this heats up the uncooled Leaf battery, degrading it slightly each time, especially on hotter days
* Keeping the charge between 50-80% when manageable
* Charging up to 100% at least once a month, and letting it 'top off' to rebalance the pack for at least a few hours afterwards
* Not driving like a maniac, despite having more torque in this car than I've ever had in any of my previous cars
This kind of thing (minus the driving like a maniac bit) is what puts me off EVs. I guess it's unavoidable? My experience with laptop and phone batteries (holding much less charge pretty quickly) doesn't help. My phone (iPhone 12) says battery health is at 81% but it doesn't feel like it so I'm not sure I'd trust that Leaf saying it's got 93%.
Hmm, my friend had a 2015 Leaf, the interior seemed much nicer and more modern than this 2023 model.
> There is no 'play/pause' button. Anywhere. At least not on the steering wheel or the display area. You have to go into the music section on the entertainment display, then press the software play/pause button. That's dumb.
My new to me 2023 Honda Odyssey has the same stupid issue. It's my first vehicle with a touch screen, and I have a lot of trouble hitting the pause button especially when I'm trying to mute it because I need to pay extra attention to the road. WHY is there not just a Play/Pause button on the wheel!? Or at least a physical button on the dashboard.
On my 2021 Nissan Kicks, the volume knob is the only play/pause button. It's not a mute button only, it does pause your media coming through CarPlay.
Also, this is my last Nissan. I have been thoroughly disappointed with the super buggy and laggy head unit in this thing and it is apparently a common theme for Nissan.
> they shouldn't do 16 on a 15A circuit but it seems like some do
There are 20A 120V circuits too! Called NEMA 5-20, one of its prongs is rotated. You plug that into a receptacle where one of the slots is T-shaped instead of straight. And it's standard practice for EVs to draw 80% of the maximum current, so 16A it is. I see this plug in larger machines in the office, like a large photocopier or a large vacuum.
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. Many are typically still under drive train warranty. For example, the model 3 has only been on the market for about eight years and it came with eight years of warranty on the drive train. So, most of the second hand ones would still be under warranty. And most of the EV market only started growing after that. So this is true for many second hand EVs.
And car batteries don't seem to spontaneously stop working right after the warranty expires either. So the risk is fairly low. They'll eventually degrade. But if you can pick up a car for a few thousand and then drive it for another 5-10 years, who cares? The fuel savings alone pay for the car after just a few years. Add the savings on maintenance and you are basically in the plus.
Always check if that suspiciously cheap second hand EV you're buying had active battery cooling.
A lot of the crap like the early Nissan Leafs didn't. And between that and the first gen EV battery pack design being shit in general, the battery pack just cooks itself. Its capacity falls off a cliff over time. This is where a lot of those early concerns about EV battery packs being hideously expensive consumables was coming from.
If the battery pack is actively cooled, then, as a rule, it ages gracefully. If not? Oh boy.
Until I got an EV and realized it's not really an issue. There is always an App for that (and even on my car the software gets improved in that regard).
Infrastructure is getting better, even companies starting to see it as a benefit to have cheap/free chargers at their offices to get people back.
I see more and more electric trucks on the roads. It feels good.
I've realized this for myself, based on me getting ~350miles from a ICE per tank, and only filling about once ever 3-4 weeks. It's clear that for like 99.99% of my driving miles are easily in EV Range, or even plugin hybrids. Which is why my next car probably will be the later. However at only driving 350 miles per month, plus the occasional road trip, I estimate my current car will last 10 more years or more.
When I bought my Leaf last year, I actually didn't have range anxiety because I assumed the infrastructure was better than it actually was. But I'm shocked that at most places I drive to don't even have a charging station, and if they do it's like 2 spots that are both full.
And I definitely didn't factor in skiing, my favorite mountain has 4 charging stations in one of the hotel's parking lots.
> Lack of standards: For 'L3' DC Fast Charging, the Leaf has a CHAdeMO port. Teslas and many newer EVs have NACS. Then there's CCS1 and CCS2. And charging stations are run by multiple vendors with multiple apps and payment methods. It's not like gas stations, like with Shell, BP, Buckee's, etc. where you just drive up, stick the gas nozzle in your tank, and squeeze.
Afaik in Europe, CCS2 is the standard (and mandatory these days), when I rented an EV a few weeks back there was no location which didn’t have it. And all the spots I tried charging at except Tesla accepted card payment (though there were a pair of times it was a struggle getting a card to work).
Apps / memberships will get you cheaper prices but that’s about all I saw (and I didn’t bother with any of it).
TBH the only things that annoyed me were implementation issues of the car (a polestar 4) as well as how overly wide it is. And that the rental company (AVIS) does not provide an AC adapter, so I was not able to charge at any wallplug even though I had the opportunity to charge the car at least twice over in all (I will likely purchase one if that remains their policy and I rent more EVs).
All this is modulo it being summer and a pretty long range model so range anxiety was present but reasonably limited.
I understand how the US and EU have different electrical outlets, voltages and frequencies. The systems developed independently, standardized on compatible versions locally, and standardizing globally would be very expensive and almost impossible to do safely.
I don't understand how North America and Europe settled on different EV charging plugs.
I also rented a Jeep Avenger EV a few weeks back in the UK, several smaller, out of the way vendors still required their specific App and where contactless payments were an option it more expensive at around 80 to 90 pence per KWH. A week into the hire I found I could use my Tesla app and the supercharger network to charge my rental and the max there is only 51 pence per KWH and the supercharger network is expansive just works. An EV is a good option for the UK if you prefer automatics or EV's I will certainly hire one again.
It's funny he mentions Buc-ees, as on the last couple of road trips with my non-Tesla EV buc-ees was a common charging stop where it was just pull up, plug in, and tap my credit card.
In fact, I haven't had to use an app for a DCFC in several years. They either work with plug and charge or take payment directly on the dispenser.
> And charging stations are run by multiple vendors with multiple apps and payment methods. It's not like gas stations, like with Shell, BP, Buckee's, etc. where you just drive up, stick the gas nozzle in your tank, and squeeze.
The "how to juice your car" question is pretty much solved on the electrical and communications side... but the "how do you pay for the juice" question is indeed absurd. I understand that providers of high capacity charging stations wish to charge a bit extra because a single 200 kW+ DC charger quickly reaches 40k € in pure hardware cost, in addition to the installation cost and the regular swapping of cables due to thieves. But why the EU and the US governments haven't stepped in yet and mandated either a "roaming" standard (where my primary billing contact would be a regular electric utility with a set base price per kWh and optional surcharges for high-capacity chargers or stations in high demand) or acceptance of all common credit and debit cards is way beyond me.
Instead, it's not just multiple vendors, apps and payment methods - it's also a (sometimes wild) difference in price depending on how you pay, at the same station. In contrast, at each gas station there is a sign that's visible from afar stating the exact price for your fuel, with the only thing one might hope for is a 1 cent discount for high volume diesel fuel pumps (aka, your truck's hole is big enough to fit a truck diesel nozzle) and a further 1 cent discount from some sort of loyalty reward scheme.
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 luggage.
If only the chairs in the eGolf were a bit better...
Looks like you bought a faulty computer which happens to have 4 wheels buddy.
The neutral and parking brake issues: that just by itself should make Nissan stocks plummet. 2025 and we have these issues? It definitely looks an involution to me.
Things we humans are still lame at: adapters. Power adapters, cable data adapters. Why do we have bazillions adapters?
Can't we just design one adapter for the whole world that makes happy both manufacturers and customers? If not governments should step in and force manufacturers to include all adapters ever needed as part of a car purchase. That you have to spend more money just to charge a car because of the adapter is ridiculous.
If EVs are in this line of quality/user experience in general, thanks I'll pass and get something reliable and old school that actually works as expected.
Edit: And we don't need mobile apps to control our cars. Another really stupid and ridiculous idea that has been pushed to customers when no-one actually asked for that.
The trick with neutral in the leaf is that you have to hold the gear selector in the neutral direction for about a second. No relation to brake pedal timing as far as I can tell. No idea why neutral has that delay given none of the other “gears” do.
How can you write "I bought the cheapest EV" in the blog title, and have a section called "Why buy Leaf?" followed by a one-liner zinger aphorism "Price." without writing... the price you bought your used Nissan Leaf for? Someone might want to reference how much it cost back in 2025 a few years down the road.
> and I found myself with a very short commute, only driving a few miles a day, and a family minivan we use for nearly all the 'driving around the kids' stuff.
>
> So I wanted a smaller car (get back a foot or so of garage space...) that was also more efficient.
All this to say what he really needs was an electrically assisted bicycle instead of a huge and heavy energy wasting vehicle.
Something which this article highlights is the lack of reliable rail in the USA.
Where I am there is a decent rail network, and the rail provider has a fleet of EVs for rent, where the cost of the electricity is included. This provides a "green" last mile solution even if the public transport itself in each area may be lacking (often it's not however).
So a trip looks like this:
Hop on the train which quickly takes the lion's-share of the travelling distance, then switch to an EV that fills the gap to the final destination/s. Then do this process in reverse to get home.
This approach solves the largest problems presented by the author.
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
If you buy used cars you are limited to what someone else bought 3 or more years ago. new didn't have many options then. Even now there are not many good options for a new car buyer but most niches have something. I wanted an used id.buzz, but that won't be an option for 2 more years and so I'm stuck with the current minivan. my truck is dieing and a silverado could do but I can't afford payments on it new so again 2 more years and I need something else in the meantime.
> They seem to not require an Internet connection for their cars
That would be the only reason to get that car now days! Can the car just drive without Internet. I want my car to be my not connected to cloud for all kinds crap.
Its fun to witness EVs living up to their original promise. Yes, the 1st generation of EVs without battery heating and cooling were mostly disposable experiments to catch-up with Tesla. That much is fact. However, the late model, new-wave of EVs (with proper battery technology) have crushed every excuse, except for variety.
400 dollars for a 2012 nissan leaf with 80% battery life and 80k miles (saved from being junked.)
MA taxes and delivery made it about 1k when it was all said and done. Insurance is 400/year.
We fit 3 kid seats in the back and have replaced all our metropolitan rides with the nissan. Ostensibly we are all < 6ft tall otherwise the 3 seats wouldn't work.
Our range is 60 miles in the summer, 50 in the winter. Because of how we use it a regular 15 amp plug works for us. Any long trip is taken with our 2018 honda HRV + Thule.
I've been monitoring the usage of our gas car and financially it makes more sense for us to rent a gas car for our trips rather than pay for the ownership + insurance of our car. The math on yearly ownership of the gas car is:
555 treasury yield when selling the car (15000 * 0.05 on a 30 less 30% taxes),
1200 insurance,
200 yearly maintenance (oil changes, amortized tires...),
375 excise tax,
40 inspection
That's about 2.2k/year or about 4 weeks of rental for an SUV. We're still holding on to the gas car for the impromptu apple picking/beach day/day trip that sets us over the 50 mile radius, but zipcar could fill that void
Drag coefficient matters a lot for EVs. Air resistance reduces the range of all cars, but you notice the decrease in an EV. (When I plan a long trip, I use windy.com to see if I'll have a headwind or a tailwind and I plan accordingly.)
That's why EVs look different. And why EV trucks often have terrible range, even though they have more room for batteries.
The coefficient isn't what matters; it's CdA (coefficient of drag times frontal area). (And what it matters for is efficiency at highway speeds.) Like, my Kia EV9 has a Cd of 0.28, but the frontal area of a schoolbus. My mi/kWh at highway speeds is much worse than what an electrified Camry with a 0.36 Cd would get.
Something the size of a Camry would be totally fine as an EV. Lucid Air is approximately this shape and is a great EV.
(And at lower speeds, drivetrain and tire friction become bigger factors.)
88 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 72.6 ms ] threadOops. My work daily is the same Leaf, my personal car is a '95 1.8 Turbo Miata. The Leaf suffers.
They are also heavier, so need different set ups in order to handle decently.
But, that's why they look so different.
* Keeping the charge between 50-80% when manageable
* Charging up to 100% at least once a month, and letting it 'top off' to rebalance the pack for at least a few hours afterwards
* Not driving like a maniac, despite having more torque in this car than I've ever had in any of my previous cars
This kind of thing (minus the driving like a maniac bit) is what puts me off EVs. I guess it's unavoidable? My experience with laptop and phone batteries (holding much less charge pretty quickly) doesn't help. My phone (iPhone 12) says battery health is at 81% but it doesn't feel like it so I'm not sure I'd trust that Leaf saying it's got 93%.
The only time it makes sense to buy an EV is if it's used.
Edit: He bought used.
> There is no 'play/pause' button. Anywhere. At least not on the steering wheel or the display area. You have to go into the music section on the entertainment display, then press the software play/pause button. That's dumb.
My new to me 2023 Honda Odyssey has the same stupid issue. It's my first vehicle with a touch screen, and I have a lot of trouble hitting the pause button especially when I'm trying to mute it because I need to pay extra attention to the road. WHY is there not just a Play/Pause button on the wheel!? Or at least a physical button on the dashboard.
Also, this is my last Nissan. I have been thoroughly disappointed with the super buggy and laggy head unit in this thing and it is apparently a common theme for Nissan.
My 2016 Ford with CarPlay was rock solid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuling_Hongguang_Mini_EV
"In 2020, the Mini EV had a price starting at US$4,162, and topped out at US$5,607 for a fully loaded model, making it China's cheapest electric car."
There are 20A 120V circuits too! Called NEMA 5-20, one of its prongs is rotated. You plug that into a receptacle where one of the slots is T-shaped instead of straight. And it's standard practice for EVs to draw 80% of the maximum current, so 16A it is. I see this plug in larger machines in the office, like a large photocopier or a large vacuum.
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. Many are typically still under drive train warranty. For example, the model 3 has only been on the market for about eight years and it came with eight years of warranty on the drive train. So, most of the second hand ones would still be under warranty. And most of the EV market only started growing after that. So this is true for many second hand EVs.
And car batteries don't seem to spontaneously stop working right after the warranty expires either. So the risk is fairly low. They'll eventually degrade. But if you can pick up a car for a few thousand and then drive it for another 5-10 years, who cares? The fuel savings alone pay for the car after just a few years. Add the savings on maintenance and you are basically in the plus.
A lot of the crap like the early Nissan Leafs didn't. And between that and the first gen EV battery pack design being shit in general, the battery pack just cooks itself. Its capacity falls off a cliff over time. This is where a lot of those early concerns about EV battery packs being hideously expensive consumables was coming from.
If the battery pack is actively cooled, then, as a rule, it ages gracefully. If not? Oh boy.
Until I got an EV and realized it's not really an issue. There is always an App for that (and even on my car the software gets improved in that regard).
Infrastructure is getting better, even companies starting to see it as a benefit to have cheap/free chargers at their offices to get people back.
I see more and more electric trucks on the roads. It feels good.
And I definitely didn't factor in skiing, my favorite mountain has 4 charging stations in one of the hotel's parking lots.
Afaik in Europe, CCS2 is the standard (and mandatory these days), when I rented an EV a few weeks back there was no location which didn’t have it. And all the spots I tried charging at except Tesla accepted card payment (though there were a pair of times it was a struggle getting a card to work).
Apps / memberships will get you cheaper prices but that’s about all I saw (and I didn’t bother with any of it).
TBH the only things that annoyed me were implementation issues of the car (a polestar 4) as well as how overly wide it is. And that the rental company (AVIS) does not provide an AC adapter, so I was not able to charge at any wallplug even though I had the opportunity to charge the car at least twice over in all (I will likely purchase one if that remains their policy and I rent more EVs).
All this is modulo it being summer and a pretty long range model so range anxiety was present but reasonably limited.
I don't understand how North America and Europe settled on different EV charging plugs.
In fact, I haven't had to use an app for a DCFC in several years. They either work with plug and charge or take payment directly on the dispenser.
The "how to juice your car" question is pretty much solved on the electrical and communications side... but the "how do you pay for the juice" question is indeed absurd. I understand that providers of high capacity charging stations wish to charge a bit extra because a single 200 kW+ DC charger quickly reaches 40k € in pure hardware cost, in addition to the installation cost and the regular swapping of cables due to thieves. But why the EU and the US governments haven't stepped in yet and mandated either a "roaming" standard (where my primary billing contact would be a regular electric utility with a set base price per kWh and optional surcharges for high-capacity chargers or stations in high demand) or acceptance of all common credit and debit cards is way beyond me.
Instead, it's not just multiple vendors, apps and payment methods - it's also a (sometimes wild) difference in price depending on how you pay, at the same station. In contrast, at each gas station there is a sign that's visible from afar stating the exact price for your fuel, with the only thing one might hope for is a 1 cent discount for high volume diesel fuel pumps (aka, your truck's hole is big enough to fit a truck diesel nozzle) and a further 1 cent discount from some sort of loyalty reward scheme.
The choice was
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 luggage.
If only the chairs in the eGolf were a bit better...
The neutral and parking brake issues: that just by itself should make Nissan stocks plummet. 2025 and we have these issues? It definitely looks an involution to me.
Things we humans are still lame at: adapters. Power adapters, cable data adapters. Why do we have bazillions adapters?
Can't we just design one adapter for the whole world that makes happy both manufacturers and customers? If not governments should step in and force manufacturers to include all adapters ever needed as part of a car purchase. That you have to spend more money just to charge a car because of the adapter is ridiculous.
If EVs are in this line of quality/user experience in general, thanks I'll pass and get something reliable and old school that actually works as expected.
Edit: And we don't need mobile apps to control our cars. Another really stupid and ridiculous idea that has been pushed to customers when no-one actually asked for that.
All this to say what he really needs was an electrically assisted bicycle instead of a huge and heavy energy wasting vehicle.
Where I am there is a decent rail network, and the rail provider has a fleet of EVs for rent, where the cost of the electricity is included. This provides a "green" last mile solution even if the public transport itself in each area may be lacking (often it's not however).
So a trip looks like this:
Hop on the train which quickly takes the lion's-share of the travelling distance, then switch to an EV that fills the gap to the final destination/s. Then do this process in reverse to get home.
This approach solves the largest problems presented by the author.
That would be the only reason to get that car now days! Can the car just drive without Internet. I want my car to be my not connected to cloud for all kinds crap.
400 dollars for a 2012 nissan leaf with 80% battery life and 80k miles (saved from being junked.)
MA taxes and delivery made it about 1k when it was all said and done. Insurance is 400/year.
We fit 3 kid seats in the back and have replaced all our metropolitan rides with the nissan. Ostensibly we are all < 6ft tall otherwise the 3 seats wouldn't work.
Our range is 60 miles in the summer, 50 in the winter. Because of how we use it a regular 15 amp plug works for us. Any long trip is taken with our 2018 honda HRV + Thule.
I've been monitoring the usage of our gas car and financially it makes more sense for us to rent a gas car for our trips rather than pay for the ownership + insurance of our car. The math on yearly ownership of the gas car is:
555 treasury yield when selling the car (15000 * 0.05 on a 30 less 30% taxes), 1200 insurance, 200 yearly maintenance (oil changes, amortized tires...), 375 excise tax, 40 inspection
That's about 2.2k/year or about 4 weeks of rental for an SUV. We're still holding on to the gas car for the impromptu apple picking/beach day/day trip that sets us over the 50 mile radius, but zipcar could fill that void
The Camry has a drag coefficient of about 0.36.
The Leaf is about 0.28.
https://ecomodder.com/wiki/Vehicle_Coefficient_of_Drag_List
Drag coefficient matters a lot for EVs. Air resistance reduces the range of all cars, but you notice the decrease in an EV. (When I plan a long trip, I use windy.com to see if I'll have a headwind or a tailwind and I plan accordingly.)
That's why EVs look different. And why EV trucks often have terrible range, even though they have more room for batteries.
Something the size of a Camry would be totally fine as an EV. Lucid Air is approximately this shape and is a great EV.
(And at lower speeds, drivetrain and tire friction become bigger factors.)