Living With An Electric Car Changed My Mind

hello everyone and welcome I have a confession to make they say you know the first step is admitting you have a problem so yeah you know I'm just gonna go out say it I've got range anxiety feels good to get it out so when my gas tank reaches a quarter of a tank I will fill it up anything less is just too risky and that's part of why I thought I wouldn't enjoy driving an electric car I thought it would give me way too much anxiety because driving an electric car especially many of today's modern electric cars which have about 100 miles of range is a lot like driving a gasoline car that only has a quarter of a tank when it's completely full and so that initially gave me a lot of anxiety and I thought there's no way that I'm gonna enjoy driving around in an electric car and Nissan was kind enough to let me drive this 2018 Leaf for the past six months now driving an electric car for the past six months hasn't cured my range anxiety but it has completely changed my mind about how I feel about them and the biggest difference about how I felt before versus how I feel now about electric cars after having driven one for a long time is that they actually have plenty of range already even the ones with the hundred miles even this Nissan Leaf with a hundred fifty miles and so I think one of the biggest things pulls people back from saying no I can't get into an electric or is the range only 150 miles of range but for the people that electric cars make sense for those that actually it is a logical decision to purchase one of these vehicles a hundred fifty miles is actually way more than enough and that leads to my unpopular opinion I'm sure some people will have some negative feelings about this opinion but it is that if you're going to buy a boring car if you're just going to go out and buy a boring car anyways it might as well be electric and I'm gonna get into why in this video and talk about some of the good and the bad things about this Nissan Leaf and owning an electric or what it's like to live with one for six months and yes I still fill up my gasoline cars when they reach a quarter tank now electric cars are really fun but they're not right for everyone that was bad there are certain conditions which I think need to be met in order for an electric car to make sense for people so the first one being you either have a garage or a place to charge that vehicle if you don't have a place to charge the vehicle I'm not saying you can't get by with an electric core I'm just saying it's gonna be less convenient than having a gasoline car and in my opinion things should always progress forward we should always have things that are more convenient better easier to live with which electric cars can be in many ways but not if you don't have a way to charge them at home the second thing I think you need if you're going to own an electric car is another car and now you're thinking Jason that's idiotic why are you telling me that I should have to course hold on hear me out I think there is some logic to this so the majority of two-person households in the United States have two or more cars so if there's more than one person living in a house chances are that house has more than one vehicle and I think I truly do think that if you're gonna own more than one vehicle one of them might as well be electric there are so many benefits to these electric cars again if you're the type of person that just wants a car that's gonna get you from A to B it's going to do awesome things these are actually quicker then you know most gasoline cars it's wild how fast these electric cars are they have the instant torque you know they're quiet they're smoother there's no rumbling from an engine or transmission you can preheat them in the winter in a closed-in environment you can pre cool them in the summer they're very easy to maintain they're very cheap to operate and you can start every day off with a full charge now am I saying that if you're single and you don't have a garage you shouldn't get an electric car no that's not what I'm saying I just think it's going to be less convenient if you do currently yeah you can buy a Tesla and you can have 300 miles of range and you can drive across the country but it still takes longer you still have to charge and plug in in charging times right now aren't as fast as they could be so I think as a road trip vehicle gasoline is currently more convenient and for that I'm not going to say you should get into an Eevee if you know you live at home by yourself you don't have a grudge you don't have the place to charge it I don't think honestly at this moment not yet I don't think it makes sense but I think there are plenty of people you know plenty of families out there living with two cars or more for their household and one of those being electric for a round town is an awesome awesome awesome choice that's three awesomes okay now that we've talked about conditions for owning an Eevee let's talk about range anxiety because I think this is the biggest thing that kind of holds people back so we're gonna do a little bit of very simple very easy very fun of course because it's math math is fun math and so the math is the average American drives about twelve thousand miles per year if you divide that by 365 that's the number of days in a year that gives you about 33 miles per day any electric vehicle out there absolutely any electric vehicle out there can get you 33 miles so that means the average Americans needs can be met with an electric car now I'm not saying you got to go on these crazy road trips with them I'm saying your daily commute can be satisfied with an electric car every day you get home from work you plug in your car every morning you get in your car you've got a full charge you can do absolutely anything in the city you know get around anywhere you need to get come back plug it in and wake up the next day what do you know you've got a full charge again you never have to go to a gas station your car is always full every morning that's a really beautiful thing about electric cars that I think is actually more convenient takes 10 seconds to plug it in and you've got a full tank full battery charge every single morning now there's actually a lot of advantages of driving an electric car especially in a city environment where your top speeds aren't very high now of course you know most of us aren't ever reaching the top speeds of our vehicles anyways we're all obeying the traffic laws and so you know in city environments where you can't go that fast regardless these things are seriously quick because up to about forty fifty miles per hour these things have crazy good acceleration they have all that peak torque available from zero rpm and it's available instantly when you put your foot down so they're very quick especially at low speeds then as you get to those higher speeds the power starts to drop off the torque starts to drop off with it and so as a result you know at low speeds and city environments we even in and out of traffic these things are really fun really quick it's easy to pull out into traffic when you know you've just got a small gap it's easy to make it through that yellow light because you get that instant torque the second you put your foot down you go through that yellow light again obeying all traffic laws while you're doing it but in a city environment it really is tough to beat how fun electric cars are because you're not doing any crazy cornering you're just accelerating and then stopping again and accelerating and stopping again and that's what EVs actually do super well they're very quick they're very punchy they've got instant response and there are a lot of fun driving in a city environment oh hey there you wanted to do a little bit more math right on so one of the questions I've gotten from a lot of friends about this vehicle is have I noticed my electricity bill go up since I've been driving it and the answer is no and so we're gonna do some simple math to understand why that is so this car has a 40 kilowatt hour battery pack and here in Idaho it cost 8 cents for every kilowatt hour that you use now if we assume a charging efficiency of just 80% and in fact I've seen studies saying the Nissan Leaf can have charging efficiencies higher than 90% so we're going with a conservative 80% so we have 40 kilowatt hour battery pack we divide that by 80% efficient that means we need 50 kilowatt hours to charge this thing each kilowatt hour is eight cents 50 times 8 cents that gives us four dollars four dollars to fully charge this vehicle that's about as much as a gallon of gas in some cities and in fact to drive an electric car the same distance as a gasoline car it's typically going to cost you about a third as much and that makes sense because electric cars are about three times as efficient as gasoline cars and moving from one spot to another as a quick example if you had a gasoline car that had a five gallon tank 30 miles per gallon that's 150 miles of range like this leaf to fill up that five gallon tank let's say gas is three bucks a gallon that's fifteen dollars versus me you know four dollars to fill this up the national average for the US would be about six dollars to fully charge this Nissan Leaf but you're thinking Jason electric cars are way too expensive I can't afford one I'm not going to buy one they cost way too much and I'm not gonna argue against you they are expensive but here's something to think about the average new car purchase price in January of 2018 according to Kelly Blue Book was over $36,000 the average new car purchase price and there are plenty of electric cars that you can get into for under $36,000 even a maxed out Honda Civic a based on the Civic I'm not talking about the SI or the type or a maxed out Honda Civic can reach $30,000 so people are spending crazy money on cars and you know a maxdale Honda Civic base isn't going to be that quick it's not going to be as fun electric cars are gonna be better and they're still gonna only cost 30 grand there's plenty of options out there in the 30 grand range so you know electric cars yes are expensive but they're not unreasonably priced considering what you get and also they continue to improve for what you pay so you know seven years ago this Nissan Leaf had about half the range had less power had less torque and yet seven years later it's the exact same price and it has nearly double the range more torque more power that's pretty cool how fast things are improving with electric cars now back on the subject of the expense of these electric cars I want to talk about luxury course because luxury cars they want to be really quiet so they try and reduce engine noise as much as possible they want to be smooth in their acceleration so they don't want you to feel the transmission shifts they want it to be a nice smooth acceleration they want it to be quiet inside the cabin and these are all things electric cars do very well even at budget price points in comparison to luxury vehicles so you know the electric motor has instant torque it's very smooth power there's no shifting so it's just a single speed that it accelerates through and they're very quiet you don't get engine noise like you do from a combustion engine electric motors are much more quiet so driving these vehicles is very quiet and they hit a lot of the key marks that luxury vehicles are trying to achieve now the final point on electric cars being expensive is that used electric cars are crazy cheap these things for better or worse many of these cars depreciate like wild but that means that you can get into a pretty new one with plenty of warranty left for a very reasonable price I started looking around you can get into a 2015 Nissan Leaf with only 30,000 miles on it that means you've got plenty of miles left on the battery warranty plenty of years left on the battery warranty these things come with eight year battery warranties and you get into a car for $10,000 twenty fifteen thirty thousand miles 10 grand I've seen plenty of them online you can get into these electric cars used for crazy cheap BMW i3 that thing drops like wild a third of its price after three years starting at forty five thousand down to fifteen thousand in just a few years so that does make it seem like it's not that smart of an investment upfront but if you do buy one used you can save a ton of money on these cars while demand is relatively low and the technology is still improving quite quickly alright so now I want to get into the advantages and disadvantages of this particular vehicle the 2018 Nissan Leaf I've been living with it as mentioned for six months and I formed a lot of opinions about what I like about it and what I don't like about it so starting off with the positive things the thing I like the absolute most about this vehicle is the acceleration and the instant torque it's quite addicting it's very cool you put your foot down you actually get put back in your seat you know you look at this car on the outside you don't think anything too much it's not going to be that quick and yet you're probably gonna win almost every stoplight race and you're probably gonna make it through you know every yellow light again obey those traffic laws it's also very quiet and that's a nice thing you know having conversations in this thing driving around town being able to talk with your passengers not really hearing any noise you know you get a little bit of electric motor noise but you don't really have you know the same amount of noise that you would have with a combustion vehicle it's quite quiet on the inside it's also very smooth you know there's no gear shifts so you accelerate it's very smooth accelerating very smooth decelerating using that region and you know you get use of that smoothness and then you get into a combustion vehicle again you have that abruptness of the gear changes which yes and it's only it's very cool and when you're in the right vehicle it's definitely enjoyable but when you're in a core and you're just trying to get from one spot to the other that's smoothness you actually begin to quite appreciate it's also a very easy vehicle to drive one of the things that I particularly like is the one pedal driving so Nissan calls this the e pedal and so you can do all of your accelerating and decelerating using just the throttle pedal now in emergencies you can of course slam on that brake pedal it still works just like normal but you can just use that single pedal to do all of your driving it will decelerate at point to G's which I found to be plenty enough for stopping coming up to a stoplight or a stop sign things like that and it's very predictable it's easy to get used to you know how much you should put your foot into it how much you should let off in order to come to a stop at your desired location I also like the gamification of the court and the information that the display so you can see you know what things you are doing and how that is affecting your range and it will actually change your range depending on what settings you have to climb it on if you have an eco mode or normal mode you know things like that it will actually change it and when you recharge the car it will give you an estimated range based on your previous driving so the the more economically you've been driving the higher your range will be when you get into the car and it's fully charged I also like that it looks like a normal car you know the previous leaf kind of looked weird quirky ugly in my opinion and this looks quite normal it's also very practical so you know the rear cargo space 40% more cargo space behind those rear seats than the Chevy Volt of course the Chevy Volt can go significantly farther than the Nissan Leaf but this seems to me to be a much more usable useful vehicle you've got more space on the inside to do whatever that may be that you need to do and finally I think it's very cool that they've improved the car in pretty much every way you know its range its power its torque its interior everything's gotten better and yet the course still has the same base price that it started with in 2011 now the car certainly isn't flawless so let's start getting into some of the things that I don't like about this vehicle and my biggest complaint is probably the most petty but either way it annoys me quite a bit so I'm gonna start up and then I will show you what I'm talking about and it has to do with the infotainment system now the Nissan Leaf does have apple carplay which i think is great especially now that apple carplay works with Waze and Google Maps it's also great for using Spotify and so we're just going to hit the smartphone connection button here so that we can use apple carplay and it says please connect a compatible Android auto or carplay device to USB so as you can see I will connect to USB it then says reading USB memory I am now connected to the device it starts playing a song from my ipod and then if I hit smartphone connection obviously I want to use apple carplay so I hit smartphone connection now it says to start apple carplay please disconnect and reconnect the device so I have to every single time I want to use apple carplay disconnect reconnect the device then it says it's starting apple carplay and then I can finally go into apple carplay use Google Maps Spotify ways whatever but every single time you use it you have to re disconnect reconnect that plug and I don't understand why you couldn't just have the car turn it on have it plugged in to your phone and it automatically enables you to use apple carplay like plenty of other vehicles out there so that is my biggest frustration here with the leave is that every single time you have to disconnect reconnect in order to actually use apple carplay another thing that I don't like is the way that the brake pedal feels when your using the e pedals so I really do like using the e pedal and just doing single pedal driving but occasionally you do need to use the brakes and so when you do use the brakes using that a pedal there's a bit of a dead zone so as you get into it a little bit nothing changes you don't feel any braking even though you're starting to press on that brake pedal and then once you get past that initial bit of depression on to that brake pedal you then start to have some braking force some additional braking force over the e pedals braking force and so it gives you this weird unnatural feel when you're using the e pedal and using the brakes the actual brakes themselves it feels a bit unnatural to do now if you turn the e pedal off and you just use the brakes normally they feel normal they have no dead zone as you initially start to get into them they feel great you don't have this transition between mechanical or regen but when you are using the e pedal that's when you notice it and there's a bit of a dead zone and it feels a bit weird getting onto that brake pedal I'm also not a huge fan of Nissan's Pro pilot assist so this is their adaptive cruise control system and the reason why I'm not a huge fan of it is it seems overly cautious and a bit too aggressive with the brakes so for example if the car in front of you is taking a right-hand turn you know what speed you need to be at and then you can pass along by them after they make that turn with pro pilot on it brakes very aggressively once that person starts to slow down for that turn and so you come to a very low speed then the car behind you is mad at you because you're slowing down so much for no reason I don't like that about it seems overly cautious overly aggressive with the brakes I've also had it flash at me warnings and with audible warnings as well that I'm going to hit the car in front of me when I'm clearly not going to so coming to a stop at a red light and you know I'll use the e pedal to brake and I know that I'm fine I'll have my foot on the brake pedal I know that I've got plenty of space between myself in the car in front of me and it will start flashing at me and telling me that I'm going to get into a collision so it makes you start to panic when you know there's no reason you need to panic you're actually stopping with plenty of distance between you and the car in front of you I also wish that the car offered telescopic steering this is the SV it's the middle tier Nissan Leaf and you can move the wheel up and down but you cannot move it in or out so you know I wish that I could bring the steering wheel a little bit closer but unfortunately there's only one set setting for the steering wheel you can put it all the way which is nice I've got plenty of room for my knees up that said I would like to be able to bring the steering wheel in a little bit closer now one final disadvantage is for as the Nissan Leaf is that the battery is air-cooled and so vehicles like the Chevy Volt Tesla's they use liquid cooling for the battery and this enables you to keep them in a much tighter range and that's where batteries like to be batteries like to be in a very specific temperature range when they get colder than that or hotter than that they get very unhappy and you can have increased battery degradation now Nissan has made changes to the leaf and the battery over the years to improve this but it still is using air cooling and I think there is an inherent advantage to liquid cooling and part of what makes me think that is their owners manual you know that gives you some tips as far as things that you should do for keeping the battery life long for the lithium-ion battery one example is that they say allow the vehicle and the lithium-ion battery to cool down after use before charging so in other words they're saying when you come home from work don't immediately plug it in and I think that's kind of crazy you should have a cooling system that can manage that batteries temperature you can plug it in you go inside you don't worry about it so I think it's kind of unreasonable to assume that the consumer shouldn't do something where they have to come back out into the garage back out to their car and plug it in later after its cooled down everything again as I mentioned earlier should always be more convenient not less convenient it also says use normal charging or trickle charging and minimize the use of public fast charge or quick chargers and so you know thinking about not plugging it in immediately after use and then not using quick chargers basically what's that saying is if you don't want to you know degrade your battery's life how long it lasts and again it does come with an 8 year 100,000 mile warranty so it's not something you have to think about for a long time if you're buying one of these new but basically that's saying don't you know go on road trips because road trips are going to degrade the life of the battery and so you know you shouldn't charge immediately after use and you shouldn't use fast charging and you're doing both of those if you are going on a road trip so to me that's a bit disappointing to see I think it would be cool if they did have liquid cooling and you could use the cooling system even when the car is off to make sure that that battery doesn't get too hot or too cold in order to prevent degradation that battery long-term so to summarize all of this if you live in a multiple car household and you have a place to charge an electric car I can't imagine why you wouldn't want a second car to be electric there's just so many cool advantages to them they're very neat am I saying personally I'm gonna get rid of all of my gasoline cars no I'm stubborn I think noise is awesome and I like my gasoline course but I am going to be buying an electric car and I'm surprised by that you know driving this thing around for the past six months it alleviated my concerns about range anxiety I no longer think that a 100 mile range evie is inadequate even a bit less than that and what's really cool about that is that there's a ton of options that are very cheap used in you know in that hundred mile range so that's very cool to me I'm excited about looking at picking up a new evey to put in the garage I think they're a ton of fun around the city very cool so I'm going to be picking one up and I would recommend the same if you have the space for it if you need a second car if you got a place to charge it I think they are fantastic so thank you all so much for watching and if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave those below

Channel: Engineering Explained

Views: 1,191,640

Rating: 4.7526135 out of 5

Keywords: nissan leaf, tesla, tesla model 3, tesla model s, tesla model x, electric car, cars, sports cars, supercars, muscle cars, luxury cars, bmw i3, fiat 500e, kia soul EV, best cars, best electric cars, best gasoline cars, most efficient cars

Id: Qo4byxhI6kY

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/huppie]

TL;DW?

[u/EtherDad]

We have two Chevy Bolt’s in Minnesota. No range anxiety even in Winter and DCFCs are spreading like wildfire. Disagree a gas powered vehicle is needed anymore. When you are on a long road trip you have to stop for a break anyways and that is when we charge. We also subscribe to Windsource from Xcel energy for wind generated electricity.

[u/paulwesterberg]

The 2013 Leaf also had problems with erratic braking behavior. It is unfortunate that Nissan hasn't fixed that issue.

[u/Zeegen]

Hit the nail on the head. With NOS.