Thanks, Lawrence, for reporting on your lease experience. Here is ours.
We returned our 2012 LEAF last February, after our first-ever experience leasing a car. With just over 47k miles, we had lost one bar on the battery meter, and my spouse (the principal driver) thought we were about to lose a 2nd bar based on daily range observations. The LeafSpy app corroborated this feeling, reporting the battery state-of-health as 79%, after 39 quick-charges and 1524 L1/L2 charges, as of the last day we had the car.
The stated residual value on our car was $17k, though Nissan reduced that by $5k for pretty much everyone. But the KBB.com value of our car was only about $6k or so, and given the loss of battery capacity plus the energy-sucking heater in the 2012 car, we never considered keeping it.
Our turn-in experience was positive. We had scraped a rear fender, and estimates I had gotten for repair were $600 (detailing shop), $800 or so (Nissan Dealer body shop), and $1200 (3rd-party big body shop chain). The end-of-lease evaluator set the "excessive wear and tear" fee at <$500, so we were happy to pay that. She told us that Nissan Assurance likely would not repair the damage anyway -- they just auction off these cars.
Which brings us to the 2013 LEAF that we purchased to replace the 2012. The Nissan dealer didn't have any we considered within our budget, nothing anywhere close to the prices we've seen mentioned in this list, online, etc. We feel fortunate to have found a Portland (OR) dealer who specializes in EVs -- there were 25 or so used LEAF's in their lot when we visited, along with a couple Fiat 500e's and a VW e-GOLF. One of the salesmen drives a Tesla S (and said his replacement motor's starting to make noise, but I digress), so they were both knowledgeable and experienced in the EV world.
We ended up purchasing a 2013 SV model with only 9k miles on it for under $14k. We had to wait a bit for them to get a version in with the backup camera, quick-charge port, and heat pump features we wanted (and, it had to be blue :-). LeafSpy battery stats on this car showed 91% SOH (2 QC and 329 L1/L2 charges) when we first viewed it, though SOH had dropped to 88% when we took possession of the car a week later. The dealer told us it was not unusual for the SOH to decrease or move around like this when the car has not been driven/charged for some months, which is evidently true: After a week of driving and eight L2 charges at home, SOH was up to 94%. Carfax showed this car as having spent its life registered in the climate of the San Francisco, CA area, so that, the low number of charge cycles, and the low miles, indicate that the car & battery was likely treated pretty gently before we got our hands on it.
I should mention that we wiped the 2012 LEAF's navigation system before turning in the car. Our 2013's previous owner was not so careful, so we took care of that for them. It took some searching, but we eventually found an SD memory card old and small enough to be recognized by the 2012 LEAF, and were able to transfer the nav-system definitions from the old car to the new. But to be honest, we recently got our first smart-phone, so Google Maps and Plugshare are getting a lot more use than the builtin LEAF nav-system.
For our usage pattern, a daily commute of about 60 miles, we would regularly use most of the 2012 car's battery capacity (with sparing use of the defroster or heater in the cool/wet seasons). Any significant side-trip would mean a quick 10-minute+ visit to a L3 charger to add enough range to make it through the day. In the last year, the reduced battery capacity meant an almost daily dip into the first low-battery warning within 5 miles of getting home. My spouse was pretty nonchalant about this, but I definitely experienced range anxiety in the last few months.
So for us, the 2013 model is almost like a different car. Not only do we now have a full 12 bars of capacity on the meter, but the more efficient inverter (we were told 14%) and stronger regen makes a huge difference in the daily commute -- we regularly see 40-50% of remaining charge at the end of the day. Plus the heat pump means you can use the heater/defroster whenever you want (instead of only when seeing past the fog on the windshield becomes an issue). What luxury!
Regards, Marion On 03/29/16 10:50 AM, Lawrence Rhodes via EV wrote:
I'm returning my Leaf today. It's been great but the battery has stopped putting out full charge. To prove this I put Leaf Spy on it. It shows 88.5% when fully charged. When my 2013 is fully charged it shows 97.3%. This is a significant difference. 2013 has 6k miles on the pack. 2012 has almost 39k. Another thing to watch coming off lease is damage to your leased vehicle before you leased it. My inspector found differences in paint on one side of my 2012. The quarter panel was painted. He said we had the vehicle repaired in a substandard way. We said...WHAT?..... This car has never been in a wreck. So instead of the couple hundred dollars of usual bumps and bruises most returns get we are getting socked with 200 additional dollars for paint that is substandard. So now we have to fight Nissan over where this damage came from. They obviously did a lousy job but not so lousy that we caught it. It took an expert. Lawrence Rhodes -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20160329/14811d00/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Read EVAngel's EV News at http://evdl.org/evln/ Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
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