Here's What It's Like To Road Trip A Nissan Leaf

hello and welcome to out of spec and welcome to my driveway today we're gonna find out what it's like to road trip in the nissan leaf now to be totally up front we're not going on a big cross-country trip i just have a lot of driving to do today we'll probably have to do two charges or we get a thermal throttle rapid gate it's not too hot out but we're around 80 degrees and so we'll find out there goes a nice chevrolet bolt i'm pretty sure that's the guy i let my tesla charging adapter to through our area here they came here we have tiny house hotel right off the i-95 they came thinking we had electric car chargers they've only put in the tesla ones so i lent him my tesla to j1772 adapter not directly the property management people came over grabbed it out of the car while i was out cruising in that lexus lc 500 for the last couple days but we need to see what it's like to do some errands in the leaf i can't pile all the miles on the lexus we need to share the love so let's go cruise around in this today and see how it does [Music] all right let's get this thing turned on and see it sat for about three or four days without being driven it's at 87 we are going to back it out of the driveway because i got to put the lexus in the driveway and get that all buttoned up and of course i took the lexus to starbucks that thing is a beast that lc 500 if you're interested in the review on that car and this one we have a new channel called out of spec reviews where we review all cars not just evs so if you're only in the evs probably not the place for you but if you like all things especially this beautiful v8 streaming lc 500 convertible then that's the place for you i'll link it in the description so we have a few items on the to-do list today the first is we need to check on the status of upgrades at our local electrify america station the day after i posted that video they started work on our particular station that sounds so good oh incredible so the leaf doesn't sound that good but it doesn't burn as much fuel as this thing does i think i've averaged like 11 miles to the gallon just sitting at red line the whole time so let's put this in the driveway uh yeah so we'll go to the electrify america station check on those upgrades and then we're going to raleigh see some friends down in raleigh and then we got to go all the way up to the track so all in all we're going to do probably close to 200 miles maybe a little bit more today in the leaf we'll chat emo charge again two times and uh we'll see if it thermal throttles it'll be kind of interesting now you'll notice i keep saying thermal throttle why also i definitely need a haircut i realize thank you now the leaf is even the new leaf e plus this is the new big 62 kilowatt hour nissan leaf of course i'll have a full review on out of spec reviews and we've already done a 70 mile per hour range test on inside evs we have a lot of channels now i don't know how i'm going to explain it all but i'll put like all of our channels down below basically this car does not have liquid thermal management so if the battery gets hot it relies on ambient air and flow to cool down the battery pack and driveline components there is no ac compressor that cools down glycol that circulates around the cells that cools the pack now typically if you're just cruising around daily driving it it's no problem it really doesn't matter but where it does start to matter is when you're fast charging the car on a hot day you see most of the temperature increase in battery packs comes from dc charging it because it's taking in 50 kilowatt or almost 100 kilowatt in this car's case on chatimo standing still no airflow and so that heats things up really quick and so for the two times i've chatted mode charged this car already it has done 23 kilowatt on the first one because it was just driven up from atlanta which is where nissan keeps their press cars and then the second time it was doing 32 or 33 kilowatt and that was like the first charge of the day so i haven't been able to even hit peak speeds because i've been battling heat but today it's cloudy it's about 80 degrees it's mild let's hope that the nissan leaf can do this trip and i don't take forever sitting at a charger because it thermal throttled or rapid gated so let's go on a road trip i have a lot to tell you about this car it's actually a fantastic car and let's go for a ride of course this one being the sl it has everything including the led headlights which are very nice and uh pro pilot so that'll be helpful on this trip so we're just rolling up over here the reason that those guys had to use my adapter was because these are the only chargers that have been installed yet where i live they're just tesla destinations of course you can use the tesla to j1772 adapter it's how i charge this it's how we typically charge our i3 uh but we are going to get some level 2 public j1772s and maybe even a nice uh charge point dc charger here in the near future at the rocky mountain mills an amazing place to stop right along i-95 if you're ever traveling through it is a really cool place we have five breweries and four restaurants and a coffee house right there it's really the coolest and only cool place in all of rocky mount which is why we live here we are starting off our drive with our battery temperature towards the left we're gonna see how that creeps up throughout the day a little bit of rain may also help cool it down but i will say just even in my typical driving on warm days when it's been 90 95 degrees out whoa there's my hand sorry about that it has been extremely right up into the red almost limiting so let's get up on the highway we're gonna drive it normally we're not gonna do anything to try and save the battery temperature we're going wide open throttle on the highway baby and we'll see how this thing does to engage nissan pro pilot all you have to do is click this little button down here and then you click set and then you oh it's telling me i hit a line thank you very much nissan it actually breaks the outside wheel and pulls you in and there we go now it's on pro pilot and it does very good lane centering adaptive cruise control and just a pretty good system now if you want to get an out-of-spec shirt like this or others just go underneath the video we have started listing some merch uh i never wanted to do that but it seems people were asking and we're gonna do that we'll also be launching an online store at some point that sells like useful stuff anyway we are heading getting off the exit for the electrify america station but we should talk about the leaf for a second on the way now the leaf will show you its nearest charging stations which is very nice i mean it's good to know however it doesn't show you many of them it seems to prioritize ev go and charge point make sense uh we have no evgos around my house and we have just a couple level two charge points so what we're what we're really left with doing is using plugshare which is a fantastic app to find all of the chargers but what you miss out on is when you put in a destination the leaf doesn't really help you get there it doesn't say okay you're gonna stop it this fast charger and then that one one of the problems with non-tesla evs at the moment is none of them really have a nice easy to use route planner uh this problem will be solved probably around the end of 2020 early 2021 we'll start to see some implementation of really good route planning plus plug-in charge and other electric cars but right now it's a little lacking anyway we're right down the street from the electrify america station let's see how much work they've done because the station was offline for a little while and i see a trailer and traffic cones and new chargers ooh this is looking good i want to have a head-on collision with that guy man what a way to go hit a honda cross tour so we can see the old chargers bulked up over there and the new ones wow they're beautiful okay so the chatimo they've kept over here but they've moved it on the right side are these the new signet units we gotta go explore so before we start exploring around and looking at some of everything around here let's get the car charging and just see if it works now we are at a really high state of charge but that's okay you got to open up the little flap over here you got to open this port open the chatimo and then i will get this connected and then we'll look around so here we go just swiped it in the app we're initiating and are we going to be able to charge i hear some contactors clicking here we go we are and these are nicer screens for sure the nissan just beeped there i am and we're charging up very nice 20 i don't expect too many too much speed here at 81 but the battery is cold what's funny is this is the fastest i've seen the leaf charge that's not bad so we'll just let this charge up because why not and uh opportunity charging if someone else was here i would never do that but let's take a look at these units so we have a 150 kilowatt ccs 50 kilowatt shadimo these are the signet units as predicted they're the high-powered charging stations and so this one's the 350 kilowatt double ccs pinned ones these are beautiful look at all those lights they don't flash in person like they are on the video right now then we have 150s and then we have another 350 and you can see the old stations and the old power cabinets here these are episec units and i've always had the most trouble charging at fsec units so i'm glad that these are gone and they seem to be gone or going away from all the electrified american stations all of these site swaps like this have all been from ephesec and they're putting in these signets or abb units and let's take a look at the new power cabinets over here so all they really had to do was i don't think they had to run new conduit they just swapped out the chargers see this is what does all the work to charge an electric car and then put the other ones in so they're looking pretty good i can hear some fans so you can see we're charging on this one right here which is pretty cool and here's the big transformer back here let's see they have a 750 kva so this basically you know with with a little power factor but 750 kilowatt from the grid to run all of this and yeah it's looking pretty good and that's a huge upgrade so i will say the leaf plugged in charge swiped no issues activated on the first go and i think this is electrify america getting ready for all of the more cars that are going to be using their network and systems uh for higher station reliability yeah you can see over here power cabinets electrify america cycle two batch number five final destination made in korea you can see here the efficient cabinets even if they don't work i'd take a couple of these we need to put them at the track we need some fast charging and yeah those new units just look beautiful i'd say we have successfully explored we're tapered down to 34 kilowatt let's stop we got two kilowatt hours not bad again opportunity charging oh light is off now i can unplug it come on there we go man these chademo plugs i cannot wait for the death of chademo it's already here the leaf is the last car battery electric car in the us to use it and it is being replaced with nissan aria which we're very excited for that'll have liquid thermal management and ccs which means i don't think you need to put in any more chatimo plugs sorry to all the leaf owners but it just doesn't make sense to support a dying standard cruising in the leaf and i don't know if you can see but the battery temperature has already creeped up to the middle which isn't bad the outside temperature is creeping up it should again get to the low 80s today and uh the middle is totally fine also this car is really a great cruiser the suspension is super compliant it's relatively quiet in here um i would say the interior for 45 000 that this car cost is not nearly that nice but you get the tax credit you get probably 10 grand off at a dealer i i think it probably makes sense after incentives but i would never pay sticker for one of these things and thankfully you don't have to either just because of federal tax credit and other things but yeah it's very a refined driving experience if you need a great commuter the leaf is a fantastic choice no doubt about it but i do think it's not a great road tripper just because of chatimo limited charging speeds and no thermal management perhaps we're gonna test that one out today because it's here's what it's like to road trip a nissan leaf i think will be the title of the video i hope it's not clickbaity because we're not really road tripping very far but i i try not to clickbait you guys we are just rolling into raleigh going by north hills the tesla supercharger is right off here uh batteries holding steady right in the middle which is pretty impressive very nice especially because we've been doing uh relatively high speeds you know 80 85 miles an hour or so on these wide open north carolina highways on a sunday morning so uh yeah let's run up we're gonna go pick up ben you guys all know ben he does videos with us all the time and uh let's see what we can get up to he's gonna drive the leaf see what it's like i don't think he's ever driven a leaf plus let's go see so this is pretty cool you get all of your ev stats here on this screen so you can get your total power output your regen i bet this card does more than 35 kilowatt regen and also look this is the street we used to live on right in there pretty cool we should go by and see how our old house is doing anyway ben lives just up the street we're gonna go pick him up and cruise around in the leaf we've arrived here at benz he's on his way let's take a look at what this car has being the sl of course it's got the good headlights it's got these wheels now this car has 15 or 16 miles less range than the base s and there's benjamin's model 3 and ben so looking pretty good stealth performance hello how's it going and uh yeah and then you get this sl plus badge on the back and that's what gives this car the exterior looks of the nice one all right ben's gonna drive the leaf around a little bit but i'm sitting in the passenger seat which doesn't have height adjustment but the driver's seat does so he's measurably lower even though you're taller than me you're like three inches high yeah i feel like i'm sitting so high and there's no way to lower this wow that's not good actually wait look at the bases seat it's at least an inch it's at least an inch yeah not a lot not so good a lot of cars are like this not unique to the leaf but still a silly thing before i drive it i want to know what we're getting into price-wise here because what was uh haley's leaf it was like a really base one it was like 30 30 grand 32 grand yeah they always come with a few 45 grand yeah but but you get the 7 500 tax credit so let's say 30 let's call it three years and you get probably 10 grand off at the dealer yeah i'm pretty sure they'll give you 10 grand off i saw there's a nissan dealer near me and they've got 10 000 2019 sl plus stickers on all of them like yeah no like still new or something right on one of them i mean that's not a bad deal if you can get it down 15 000 off or so uh oh yeah no no the but there's a blue strip on the bottom of the car oh four hundred dollars oh really 400 is good i i didn't look hold on let's look it's a 400 blue strip it's on the front yeah it's this front lip is blue i didn't realize that was paint i also haven't looked i mean i don't see any other two-tone i think you can save four hundred dollars on that one truthfully yeah it doesn't do blend so well with the red maybe on a white one it doesn't work so great with the red i don't think yeah well nissan specked this car with everything i'm sure they usually do anything else stand out to you kick plates that's probably worth it i think yeah 130 bucks i think that's you mean for this leaf right here yeah i like that yeah i like that all right we're gonna charge up the leaf just a little bit we're at 41 we need to top up to get back to rocky mount so we'll get this thing going they have to call to activate the charger over there connectors are yeah they are that's also absurdly thick for what 50 kilowatts yeah there's no need for it to be that thick but this seems to be working fine first go no problem i think he's only calling because the credit card reader wasn't working and so he's calling to activate the one over here works though right one and two i read on plugshare don't have a working reader but everything else does well whatever and uh okay cool so let's get this thing going we're charging up so i heard these can do 100 kilowatts chad mo right or somewhere around yeah but these are limited to 125 amp the charger yeah so it's only going to say is there anywhere in the us that you can charge this faster than a normal leaf whatever chart yes actually there was a station that just went online yesterday in richmond that will do 100 kilowatt chatimo and i'd like to go up there but i just don't have time and look this is the fastest we've charged the leaf so far 43 kilowatts you've done like it down low or yeah because it was hot thermal throttle it would only get up to 33 kilowatts the most ben just did some research that we should have done ahead of time but uh basically nissan uk tweeted that this does have a fan for high heat loads when charging however nissan nissan global said no right so that does not have a fan maybe some have fans maybe they're not sure maybe only in the uk maybe only right hand drive leaps i'm a fan but basically it's charging fine on this first charge of the day so very pleased with this i have an idea for rapid gaiting yeah you know those fans that are kind of look like snails that they used to blow up oh they're bouncy houses they've got a kind of a rectangle they use them on race cars yeah get those run that off your 12 volt stick it under the car and you'll blow air across battery and cool it that might be worth 10 kilowatts there i think you have a full pit crew every time you charge i've done stranger things so we started with the battery at half and now we're almost into the red we're probably 80 percent of the way until we get to the red uh so it definitely heated up but this charging session was great we're going to unplug now at 80 percent because it's tapering no reason to sit here longer and we'll continue our drive the next charger is where it's going to get interesting will we be able to pull full power or is this thing going to thermal throttle it's actually pretty good compared to the base leaf like this has a lot of good equipment i think you buy them from a dealer pretty cheap really good range performance is fine comfortable quiet like it's it's a it's actually a very good car and has a lot of range the charging thing's the only kind of weak spot i feel like if you need to drive a lot but you're not necessarily taking a trip like you're a realtor a nanny dog walker whatever you do errands all over city or you own a business and you need to deliver stuff constantly like this is pretty perfect and like the fit and finish is good the soft materials that i should be like that driving interior experience is something most car buyers i think would be very very happy with and i don't think the range issue on trips and the battery thermal throttling would matter i feel like if you lived in the uk this could be a great only car because you can't go super super far in one sitting generally i have mixed feelings still so really nice to come down and see ben and hang out in raleigh for a little bit now it's time to go home it's 80 degrees outside battery temperature cooled off just a little bit from the charging session now we're going to drive it back up go up i-95 back to rocky mount and then uh we'll drain it down and do another charge so this is really you know even though we're not going on a trip it simulates a trip in the fact that we are charging multiple times with quite a big distance in between each charge and so far i'd say the car has been flawless up to this point uh we are let's see how many miles into our trip one second it's got a lot of menus here we are only just about 100 miles into our trip and everything's working great we charged up uh our average consumption is 2.8 miles per kilowatt hour pretty poor but keep in mind we're driving it hard driving it up and down the highways at normal 80 85 mile an hour speeds this is real world use case so everything's looking good and now you join us back in rocky mount where we are going to top up i was thinking about going to the track we still might but this might be enough just to prove my point or at least to complete the test not a point that i'm trying to prove we're at 29 state of charge the battery is just a tick below the red again driving normally quite quickly up and down north carolina highways we've done a total of let's take a look over here uh come on where is it gosh this system has so many menus not a bad thing lots of good info in this car i just don't know where to find it oh there it is 140.8 miles we did a chatimo charge in raleigh topped it up to 80 and now we're down to 29 so we know for sure that this car will do 46 kilowatts uh at this state of charge and then taper around 75 which is what we saw the last charging session let's see if that behavior stays the same with the battery temperature where it is now getting close to the red again with the air management system of this car there's no way for it to cool down the pack it's just getting up there in temp we are plugged in it is connecting to vehicle initiating again first go listen to that that was pretty amazing so today we've had a flawless trip three charging sessions on electrify america with no issues on the chatimo and yeah i just love the look of these new stations it's a sunday so i don't expect any work to be done to get those out here and cleared up but i think these units are looking nicer and it's amazing that this happens so quickly so let's take a look to see what the charger is delivering because this will be different than what the car is taking in of course there's always a little bit of heat loss but we are at 29 kilowatt right now and we'll see if this ramps up we'll give it a little bit but my guess is that's what the car is gonna take because the temperature is so low so let's confirm this inside the system here so the way to see charging power is you have to turn this on two times get it to accessory power turn off air conditioning charge club is connected thank you understood battery temperature warm then we have to go up to this menu 29 kilowatt just to confirm i've charged for about 10 minutes now nine minutes dang got music on his motorcycle it's really loud and we're doing 29 30 kilowatts of course but what the leaf probably does and the the true nissan leaf experts can comment below but what it probably does is based on battery temperature it sets a fixed amperage that it wants to charge at man freaking ice cars so loud lifted trucks around here welcome to north carolina uh what it does is it probably sets a fixed amperage into the battery pack and then as pack voltage climbs it will increase so this will probably get up to maybe 32 kilowatt peak would be my guess around 70 80 percent but still significantly less and it would only get slower and slower the more we drive and heat up the pack and fast charge it because right now this is what's heating it up and of course the hotter the pack the quicker the degradation so the leaf fantastic car just doesn't love to road trip we already knew this and uh that's the end of the video now we'll see you guys on the next one you

Channel: Out of Spec Motoring

Views: 65,194

Keywords: Tesla, Model 3, model s, model x, tires, drift, skid, track mode, Kyle Conner, Roadster, Elon, Rich Rebuilds, Road Trip, Cold, Weather, Range, ESP, Track, Mode, Performance, Standard, Short, Review, Comparison, Buy, NISSAN, ariya, leaf, plus, sl, sv, 2020, rapidgate, 62kwh, 62kw

Id: gyqI4Iy0oSM

Length: 25min 46sec (1546 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020