ElECTRIC Car Problems :: 3 Years Driving a Fully Electric Nissan Leaf:: Is an EV really Better? LNAB

this is my 2015 nissan leaf it is a fully electric car that i purchased three years ago when i got it it had 13 000 miles on it and now it has just over 37 000 miles on it i made a video about a year ago that covered a lot of my concerns with having an electric car and the learning curve associated with it so i'll link that above it has now been three years that i've had my fully electric nissan leaf actually a little over three years because it was too cold to to do this a few months ago but over those three years i've definitely gotten a lot more comfortable with driving an electric car one of my main concerns was always of course nobody wants to wake up and have their car not start so i got up one day for work got ready jumped in the car and hit the button to turn the car on and the screen lit up but it had an error message on it and the car did not turn on completely i made a couple little clicking noises underneath and i wasn't sure what was wrong but the screen said t slash m error take to the dealership and i was like oh no this is exactly what i have been dreading so i was gonna be late for work i had to jump and jump out of the car and ran inside and luckily pat was home so he drove me to work really quickly and the whole day that i was at work i was just thinking like what is wrong with my car how are we going to fix this and hopefully it's not going to be super expensive i could see that the the actual battery that the car runs off of was fully charged so that was okay and that made me feel a little bit better and i went online and did a little bit of research and found out that it could be the 12 volt battery when i was at work doing research to try to figure out what could possibly be wrong with the car at lunch i went to check my email and funny enough that day an email came from the dealership where i bought the car and it said happy three-year car bursary and at that point i was uh pretty irritated because the car that was supposed to get me to work hadn't done that but i would say in the span of having the car for three years having one day when it didn't start is actually pretty good in terms of reliability now this particular week in january it was especially cold and we figured it was probably a little rough on the battery we popped the hood and looked at it and sure enough it was a little corroded and it looked like it might be the original five-year-old battery so we were hoping that was the issue picked up the new battery what was it like 150 something which was surprising to me i didn't realize the batteries cost that much uh but passed through the battery for his jeep was like 200 so it's funny though i didn't even think about think about that the car that has nothing but batteries has just the normals another battery yeah all right i did i just never i didn't think about it either you know think about it but and the guy had to actually um check the battery we brought the old one in and he double checked it in the computer it had the positive and the negative flipped the other way and then he looked at our old battery and he was like oh nope that's not the right one on the computer so he had to switch it for the other one good thing he checked because that would have saved us like doing the whole like run back to the automotive store well it's funny even even switching out a battery it's not that hard but even the terminals themselves you have to make sure they have the right thickness well because your car yeah the terminals were they didn't fit yeah they were too small little stuff you wouldn't think about best always take a picture if you're not sure of how it was placed in there you can always go back and the days of having that like we said that 50 battery are kind of going because there's so many electronics so you're gonna have to spend some money [Music] yeah so i uh forgot to plug my car in last night i was just um i was cooking dinner and i thought oh don't forget to plug your car in and sure enough so i woke up at six in the morning because it was pouring rain and the first thing that popped into my head was crap i didn't plug my car in i made it to work and i think i was uh getting nervous about nothing it actually did really well so i still have 54 i'll be pretty good to get home um yeah pretty impressive for just charging it for a couple hours now it wasn't empty like i said it was oh gosh i'm not even sure what it was at but just from driving to and from work on friday whatever was left after that plus that hour and 15 minutes or so of charging so not bad leaf i made it home barely uh i think the battery is the lowest it's ever been right now so that yellow exclamation point right there comes up when the battery is really low but um here you can see underneath the gas tank is just blinking i've actually never i've never seen that before so i was nervous pulling in that i didn't even know if i was going to make it up to the tiny house it kind of went from i think it was at eight last time i saw it and then next time i looked down it was just blinking lines and i was like oh no but it made it so we'll see um it's pretty cold tonight oh it's 29 degrees right now geez so it's gonna take a little bit longer probably to uh charge tonight but hopefully hopefully we'll have enough charge by tomorrow when i have to go to work one of my favorite things about the leaf of course is that the maintenance is just less so a lot of people have asked me what kind of maintenance you have to do and changing the wiper blades topping off fluids like windshield wiper fluid are like the main things and then you also have to check the brake fluid or have the brake fluid changed regularly according to the owner's manual so those are kind of the main things i don't have to get inspection because new jersey only does emissions so i don't have to get my car inspected i don't have an inspection sticker on my car anymore they actually took it off for me so i really enjoy not having to get oil changes and having to do some of the more regular maintenance that you would have with a gas vehicle [Applause] one of the things that i did the most recently was put new tires on and they say with electric vehicles the overall maintenance is definitely a lot less but the weak point or the place that you're probably going to have to put most of your attention is into the tires if you keep the tires in good working condition the car is going to do pretty well one of the questions that comes up regularly is how the leaf does in winter driving conditions and this year was a pretty good test for the leaf we've had a few ice storms like this one we've had a few inches of snow on several different occasions so this year the leaf really got to work through the snow and i would say overall it really does pretty well as long as the snow isn't too deep i found the traction to be pretty good especially after i got new tires all right driving to work in an ice storm do i look happy a lot of people ask how the leaf does in the winter and bad weather so today's probably the test because everything's covered in we're starting at 77 miles on the battery 100 and the temperature outside is 28. all right made it to work thank goodness 59 miles left on the battery still about 27 degrees and it has now switched to like freezing rain a little bit of like tiny pieces of hail so not the greatest and uh we'll see what this looks like in eight hours because i think it's supposed to keep doing wintry stuff all day i think the the car actually handled well i feel like most of the time i'm fairly confident in the leafs ability to drive in winter weather now considering you live on a coastal plain so everything is flat that makes a huge difference but i just go slow and leave extra stopping time and all that stuff like you would normally drive in winter weather the thing that i am more concerned about when i drive in this kind of stuff is the other drivers because even on the parkway um people were still speeding people are changing lanes quickly not leaving enough distance i was being tailgated people just don't think that the driving conditions are going to impact what's going to happen and sure enough there was a car accident a pretty good head-on collision on one of the side roads because somebody probably lost traction but um if it wasn't for the other drivers i would feel decently confident in the leaf's ability to handle this sort of stuff okay well less than eight hours later a lot of my patients canceled because the weather is pretty gross right now it's like a slushy icy rainy mix and hopefully i'm getting out in time that the roads aren't too icy but uh we'll see as we start driving okay we made it so we have 30 miles left on the battery it's a little warmer it's 32 degrees now i luckily got to leave at the warmest part of the day so the roads were a little bit better but i'm pretty proud of the leaf i feel like it did a good job handling some rough circumstances today oh hello hello dog dog okay so hopefully pat has the wood stove going because it is damp and cold in the last video one of the topics that came up a lot in the comments was the environmental impact of having an electric car and i will be the first person to admit that an electric car is not a perfect solution the only really pure good solution would be to not drive that's the only way that you're not consuming energy and creating some sort of output that would have an impact on the environment but the reality is that i have a job and i have to go to work and public transportation is not viable in the area that i live in so i had to do my research and really think about what type of driving i have to do and if gas versus electric really truly was having a better impact on the environment or less of an impact on the environment and to me the idea that some of the electricity that i can use for driving does come from renewable resources like solar and wind i know that the battery itself and the components of the battery do have an environmental toll in terms of mining and things like that but the idea is that in the long term as there are more electric cars they're going to get better and better at recycling the batteries i was actually just reading an article about a company that's going to be able to take a hundred percent of the materials in an electric car battery strip them separate them and then create a new battery without adding any extra components so that is a huge step forward in making electric vehicles more viable as a good option to have a lower impact on the environment for those of us who have to drive my final point is that i'm happy that i have the leaf i'm enjoying the process of having the electric car and i think the financial perspective of it has been great especially in a year where finances have been a very challenging topic with the pandemic not having to buy gas has been a helpful thing in the scope of this year but my main concern at this point is the longevity of the vehicle and that's just going to be like a wait and see thing i've had it for three years it's a little over five years old and we're just going to have to see over the next several years how well it holds up to my daily driving and in the long run the money that i put into it versus the years of use that i get out of it and that's also going to have an impact on how sustainable this whole process of switching to electric vehicles is going to be i had my last car for 15 years i have very strong doubts that this is going to last the same 15 years that my subaru did but i'll keep you guys updated on how things go over the next couple of years [Music] well you worried about you and me the injustice the next president to be the news hear your career it's time for you to face those fears and it's all fair to be aware and i'll be there so don't be scared just take a deep breath [Music] we have enough to realize this bigger than the both of our

Channel: Let New Adventures Begin

Views: 43,668

Keywords: car, ev, nissan, electric, fully electric, problems, battery, tm error, wont start, transmission, snow, winter, tires, wipers, maintenance, 12 volt, charging, low battery, tiny house, environment, concerns, range anxiety, 3 years, review, patrick and laura, redford, Sustainability, recycling, renewable power, cost

Id: ZUuwb3RUkM0

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021