@Ryan Following on from the EV discussion in the CCJ thread:
We’ve been a primarily EV household for 12 years now and an EV only household for 5. 2011 Nissan Leaf purchased in early 2014 that has now done a bit over 100,000km and a 2021 Tesla Model 3 SR+ that was purchased in early 2021 and has done 60,000km. Not huge distances by American standards but in line with the median yearly travel distance for New Zealanders of 10-12,000km/year, with a couple of low spots due to working overseas, COVID and then a few years of working from home.
Both cars have been great. The Leaf is at 45% battery now so she’s pretty tired but can still do my 32km/20 mile round trip commute easily enough. 2-3% capacity loss per year is about expected with the Leaf, unfortunately, but newer EVs do a lot better. The Tesla is at around 90% battery reported which tracks with an initial drop and then stabilisation that’s common to Lithium Iron Phosphate battery packs.
If you want to go super cost effective, I’m a massive fan of the Nissan Leaf. Their batteries not holding up well means they don’t make good cars for longer distances but if you do 40-60 miles/70-100 km a day they’re amazing. Nothing too major in terms of issues, they don’t mind cheap tires, there were a ton of them sold, they’ve depreciated to being super cheap and they’re a lot larger than they look, especially with the rear seats down. Our 2011 Leaf is my go-to for having to pick up larger things vs the model 3.
We get around 140Wh/km or 270Wh/mi, add 10% overhead for charging losses and you’re at roughly 3 miles per kWh from the wall. If you’re on off-peak of 25c/kWh then that’s about 8-9c/mile for energy. At $4.50/gal that’s equivalent to getting 50mpg. That may not seem ‘that’ great, but that’s without needing to worry about flooring it away from the lights or during highway merges etc. Compared to the real-life experience of getting 50mpg out of many other cars, it’s dramatically different. Cost can be cheaper if you can do stuff like use any free charging nearby, charge off solar, charge at work, etc. Tires can be a bit more expensive if you go for low rolling resistance or EV specific ones, but given the relatively small difference it makes in reality (2-3% at most), for a commuter vehicle I’d personally just go with something decent and middle of the range, then just keep the inflation up. A lot of EVs, especially the earlier ones, do seem to respond well to slightly higher tire pressures. Not just better range due to lower rolling resistance but better contact patch and better stopping distances, I suspect because they’re typically a couple hundred kg heavier than the petrol/mild hybrid equivalents.
In terms of maintenance with our Leaf, other than tires, cabin air filter and windscreen wipers there’s not much. The single-speed reduction gearbox has ATF in it that should be replaced every ~40-60k miles but that’s pretty easy, it’s much more like a conventional diff than a gearbox oil replacement. I had an on-board charger die which is a ‘somewhat’ common issue with the 2011-2012 Leafs. That’s a case of unbolting the rear seats, pinching off the coolant lines under the car and taking them off the barbs, unplugging connectors, unbolting the charger and then doing the reverse for a 2nd hand or refurbed unit. Probably less than an hour if you’re keen. Other than that, I’ve had a window switch die, I’ve done the brake fluid a couple of times just for the sake of it, greased door hinges and that’s about it. It’s still on the original brake pads and rotors with tons of life left in them.
I think in terms looking back how things have changed for us going to EVs, there’s a pretty wide range of differences, some obvious and some more subtle.
The biggest difference for me is one that’s not really ‘that’ obvious until you look back at it. Coming from an Audi A4 wagon with some minor mods the Leaf is, in a real world/usable sense, significantly quicker and has higher performance. That’s not to say the Audi wouldn’t outrun it to 150km/h or beat it away from the lights if you launched the hell out of it, but actually driving the Leaf is like having a car that’s always in launch mode at every set of lights and driving it like a hoon uses maybe 10-20% more energy, not 2-3x more petrol like the Audi did. Repeated launching a DSG is a good way to lead to expensive gearbox work. Even my fiance likes blowing people away at traffic lights in the Leaf, amusingly. Being able to actually use the capabilities of the car without constantly wondering if that was going to be the final straw that causes some expensive repair is a nice feeling.
An obvious one is the lack of maintenance, but I guess it’s less obvious because I didn’t think of oil changes, doing brakes, gearbox changes as ‘that’ big of a deal to do myself. In reality it’s probably 2-4 hours a year that it saves, but the mental load of it being gone is huge, along with in reality it wasn’t just a couple of hours to do an oil change, that was usually the ‘one thing’ I’d do with that day due to motivation. Now, once a year I give the vehicle a 15 minute once-over before it goes in for its yearly mechanical inspection (Warrant of Fitness here in NZ). That mostly consists of making sure the wheel nuts are tight, the tires have tread, nothing’s squeaking or loose, the brakes feel good, no rust, brake fluid/coolant is where it should be, that kind of thing.
A less obvious one is charging. Both EVs have cables hanging in the right place that you can just grab them and plug them in as soon as you’re parked, one car in the garage, one car out in an off-street park. It’s maybe ~10-15s to plug in or unplug before you leave. Compared to 5 minutes at a gas station every other week, even though I used to drive straight past a gas station on my way home every day I think the plugging in and unplugging is actually more convenient.
The Leaf was also a lot cheaper in yearly registration costs and insurance than the Audi, the model 3 is about the same.
Another slightly oddball advantage for us is that by using a 12V inverter we were able to keep the house running while we had a 10 day power cut during some horrendous storms last year. That was definitely eye opening in terms of when you’re used to a tree coming down being a 4-6 hour power cut at worst, you don’t necessarily extrapolate that to consider what happens when a hundred trees come down at once and the damage is more severe. The stub we’re on only powers ~10-15 houses so we were way down the priority list and basically had an extra week of power cut simply because someone needed to reinstall the fuses for the pole-top transformer. Obviously there are a ton of ways to approach this, but a 2kW 12V inverter and then just leaving the car on and in ‘ready to drive’ mode worked really well. We’d get an entire day out of the battery then could drive 10 minutes to the nearest fast charger, wait there for half an hour to top it up and then drive back. No noise, could leave the car in the garage without worrying about asphyxiating ourselves, overall cost was maybe $5-10 a day for the fast charging, probably about on par with a generator and no dealing with the maintenance of a generator etc. Have used that approach probably a dozen times now in varying situations, including all-day maintenance outages while working from home. It’s great.
unfortunately no garage