2016 Nissan Leaf: Regular Car Reviews

i want to shop at trader joe's but all i can afford is the dirt mall i want to drive a tesla model 3. but my idea of a fancy dinner is boston market i want to be woke but only corporate woke smash smash click click click click site this is the most affordable ev in the usa the owner got this 2016 nissan leaf for 10 grand well how fast does it go who cares well how far can you drive it about 70 miles well what if you run out of electricity look eddie are you gonna get your hair cut or are you just here at the barber shop to be seen unlike most evs which have a combination frunk and trunk hatch cargo space the nissan leaf has a bunch of traditional nissan engine accessories under the hood including a 12 volt battery to assist those accessories general motors did the exact same thing with the bolt ev this allows nissan to reuse as much off the shelf components and hardware which keeps design costs low if i could brain and consciousness time travel i'd go back to age 10 and say i'll do it if it makes you happy to every fussing adult making a request of me the nissan leaf's b mode which is like regen braking mode is more aggressive than a prius but not as nauseating as a tesla if i could go back in time in mind and body i'd say do you feel i'm unstimulated every time a sickly relative with tombstone breath presents me with objects here's a snow globe shake it you shake it look at it it's snowing do you like it do you like it no you can't keep it now the chevy bolt ev is more fun to drive because it has the right hand steering wheel paddle thing that automatically when you pull it it kicks in full regen anytime you want it well the leaf doesn't have that flappy paddle i mean but i guess if you touch the brake lightly you'll get regen only braking so that's something yeah merely smile and it's not the same but the leaf has proper comfortable seats unlike the bolts cafeteria hard weight saving seats i'm a small business owner in rural pennsylvania buy my son's christian rock album i keep a stack of cdrs here by the register the drive selector boob in the center console is as intuitive as a safety pencil and a circle of paper owning a nissan leaf in rural pennsylvania is as pointless as pushing the walk button at a crosswalk the idea is to make you feel like you're doing something but nothing is actually happening here maybe if everybody were to get on the electric car bandwagon we'd see some change come out of it but like striking for a wage increase everybody's got to be on board for it to work in lieu of a larger infrastructure for this type of car what you get with a nissan leaf is something that's ideal if you never plan on going very far because this car comes equipped with acute awareness of the location of every charging station in the tri-county area the range anxiety is strong with this one your worries are going to stack like bath and body works coupons granted part of this is because it's a 2016 model before a lot of the kinks were worked out with electric vehicles of course this implies that electric vehicles are in any way foolproof and free of all the issues that plagued them at the start whether the spotty range or the difficulty in finding mechanics when say the heater core goes on the fritz like the owners did cause this isn't just a regular heat exchanger with coolant flowing through it this is more like a space heater like a resistive heater with a fan on it nissan leaf for when your need to be environmentally friendly is at odds with paying off your student loans the published range is 86 miles but as time and the battery wears on the charge isn't held as strong so now the owner gets around 70 to 75 miles as for power this makes the equivalent of about 109 horsepower not too bad and 170 pound-feet of torque i mean really it's an electric car but also a five-door hatch that looks like a five-door hatch you could be forgiven for thinking this is an internal combustion engine car you could be forgiven for thinking this is an internal combustion engine car because it's as boring as that one show i can't think of right now maintenance straightforward just replace the brake fluid cabin filter or every once in a great while and rotate the tires it's a car whose value is improved not just through relative lack of maintenance requirements but by its low barrier to entry especially on the used market because well it's a nissan so it's going to depreciate like hell 10 grand for a car with 14 000 miles on it and he bought it at a dealer he's got about 34 000 miles on it now and it still runs smoother than flavorless pancakes oh but 2004 called it wants its clear tail lights back and your cracked version of windows xp and don't forget the key gen the one that plays a midi version of chop suey by system of a down when you load it nissan leaf the official car for cyclists who want to take up more of the road technological comforts are one thing but the quietness of the leaf is delightful it's easy to lose track of your speed even though it doesn't go too too fast that's because yeah okay you know no gears no transmission it just goes there's no gears to feel shifting but there's also no real accompanying noise to tell you hey you're going faster and by that i mean when you drive a tesla teslas do make noise they make this high-pitched sound and the more you hear that you're like hey i'm going fast but out of all the evs i've driven the nissan leaf is the quietest it's not that it's fast it's just that it's capable of losing track of its own slowness and also the owner put dynamat in nissan leaf i want to buy a tesla but i'm trying not to have roommates anymore every time i wipe the paper looks like wilson from castaway nissan leaf it's just fast enough to be satisfying and well handling enough you can't really find much to complain about apart from its range it's as palatable to modern sensibilities as current weezer but it's not going to get you hyped about the possibility about electric vehicles because it's just an car it's a car it's an electric car designed to be accepted by everybody from electric veal optimists to the man whose favorite genre of music is 1950s pop that's about teenagers getting killed to death upper trim models get bigger 30 kilowatt hour batteries but this base model has the 24 kilowatt hour leafs if is it leafs or leaves or leaf i'm saying leafs or leaves i'm going to switch between them because no one's correcting me if you're going to buy a leaf what you want is a 2017 and newer because by then the range is over 100 miles and current leafs get over 200 miles which is on par with the base model tesla model 3. that's a that's about 220 except the tesla model 3 knocked this off the top of the list of best-selling electric cars now whether it stays that way is anybody's guess elon could put out a tweet tomorrow that tanks the entire company so who knows in the public realm electric vehicles are like kids you want them to be like you you want them to act the way you do to have all the qualities you had or better but you can't predict how your kit is going to turn out you might want an electric car to look and act and sound like the cars you know and love and some can approximate that experience really well which is what the leaf does apart from the sound but but i feel like it'll be it'll be a while before electric vehicles reach the level of acceptance where people stop judging them in comparison to their parents because evs are not their parents but they are the future just like generation x the the generation that i'm kind of stuck in between had to get down with the arrival of new metal we're all gonna have to get used to the inevitability of more automakers going this way dear ford please give us the new truck like rcr is only now getting press cars i don't know how long it's going to be until we get the electric truck but anyway for now i have a hard time complaining if the cars were as solid as the nissan leaf and it's kind of weird because i've been crapping on nissan for a long time for just making junk and then i drive this thing and i'm like this thing's good i could see myself driving a leaf every day it couldn't replace goldie our camera car subaru but you know just as a second car this would be all right you know driving a base model leaf with the small battery is a lot like motorcycle commuting which is what i used to do pre-rcr and actually kind of in the beginning of it with my gs500 like i had my toyota echo which that did like 42 miles a gallon great but i needed more miles per gallon so i wrote a suzuki gs500 which would get like 60 if i if i you know wrote it easy but when you commute on a motorcycle you have to be conscious of where the gas stations are because like maybe you'll have a five gallon tank and yeah you get good mileage but most bikes don't have fuel gauges so you're like you have to you know filling up the tank when you don't really need to because i don't know this area that well anyway so if you are thinking about a nissan leaf and you are in the motorcycle community it's exactly like commuting on a motorcycle as far as range goes so yeah i really wanted to make fun of this but i can't nissan leaf is all right [Music] rage anxiety is causing [Music] grief [Music] sp

Channel: RegularCars

Views: 165,839

Rating: 4.9253778 out of 5

Keywords: Regular, Car, Reviews, Regular Car Reveiws, Car Review, Car Satire, Mr Regular, RCR, Leaf, Leaf Review, Leaf EV Nissan Leaf car review, RCR Leaf, Old Leaf, Nissan Leaf Range, Nissan Leaf Charging, Char Electric cars, Chap Electric cars

Id: HoOJmou2DYU

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/FigBug]

From a Leaf owner, that's pretty accurate. Would I rather have Tesla? Yup, but they are so expensive it's just not worth it. Especially now that both my wife and I work from home. We are probably driving less than 2000 km a year now on each vehicle. Why do we even have them?

[u/DanielTigerUppercut]

We had a 2013 in our garage. Good little car, only put 17k miles in 3 years because the range was so bad. I’m of the opinion that used LEAFs are great first cars for teenagers: cheap to buy, cheap to own, and for parents you can’t go very far.

[u/trevize1138]

I blame nearly all "Wull, but how much would it cost to replace thuh battery?" questions on that damn Nissan Leaf.

[u/councillleak]

I've seriously considered buying a cheap leaf or even leasing one to supplement my ICE car because I think the gas saved on my weekday commutes would come out net even financially and I can pat myself on the back for cutting emissions.

Let's say payments on a $10k Leaf for 60 months are $180. My commute is about 20 miles each way, so I could comfortably make it and even run a short errand after work if I wanted to, and crucially my work offers free electric charging. So my variable costs are practically $0 for commuting.

With 23ish work days per month, 40 miles round trip, plus a few other errands, I probably would be driving about 1000 miles for no variable cost.

Comparatively, my ICE needs premium gas (~$3.50/gal currently in my area) and averages around 20MPG. So just gas costs alone are about $175/month. I'd still take the ICE out on the weekends for fun and the occasional road trips, so I'd be spending something on gas, but definitely would make me feel better about my carbon footprint for almost no extra cost.

Sure, insurance would be a factor as well, but with the age and mileage of my Cayman I'm much more worried about the maintenance costs, depreciation (well unrealized appreciation in this crazy market), and risk of something blowing up when piling miles on the Cayman than I would be with a Leaf.

Any holes in this plan?

[u/ArcturusFlyer]

The Nissan Leaf is the singular reason why I have hope for Nissan to hold out against Toyota and Honda and continue to be relevant in the future. Toyota, despite creating the Prius, has been weirdly insistent that hydrogen is the way of the future*, and Honda has only recently started upping their alternative fuels game, resorting to cutting a deal with GM to badge-engineer two of their products.

(*: Toyota has been pushing the Mirai as being the future [that's literally what they named the damn car], but their support for hydrogen fueling stations is a tiny fraction of what Tesla has put behind the Supercharger network. IDK what their long-term game plan is, but it's apparent that the world is moving towards EVs faster than Toyota is moving on hydrogen.)

[u/newcarguy2019]

Our 2020 Leaf is great. Ideal car for our lifestyle and setup. Easy to drive, drives well, gets the job done.

[u/[deleted]]

I know this isn't really the review to make this point (because nobody uses Leafs for anything but in-town errands), but I do wish RCR would do some reading about how charging works. Every time they talk about "range" it kills me a little bit, because the reality is that charging rate and efficiency matter just as much. The bolt is a significantly worse road trip car than a model 3, not because of the "range" or because of the "supercharger network", but because the bolt fast charges like 5 times slower. I really don't want them to actually get a Lightening or a Mach-E or something and not get it.

Edit: Actually yeah in this review he mentions that newer leafs have longer ranges but I think they still use Chademo connector, and are still limited to 100 kw

[u/V8-Turbo-Hybrid]

Like many Nissan CVT models, the early Leaf is also one of shitty Nissans, it has a poor air-cooling battery design. That is why they're cheap in used car market because most Leafs come with serious bad battery degradation.

The good thing is that they don't continue that kind battery design in Ariya.

[u/anarchyx34]

I wonder when someone is going to come out with an aftermarket battery upgrade for vehicles like this. Seems like the battery (and from what I’ve heard the heater) are the only real issue with these.