You Won't Believe How Much Money I Save With My Cheap Nissan Leaf?

[Music] howdy folks nathan here and i have a two year update on this basically my kids 2016 nissan leaf s now you might be asking yourselves well why are we bothering with doing an update on a car that's you know frankly not that interesting well there's a very good reason for that and that's because i've done several other videos featuring this car and many of you guys are probably wondering right about now what's a really economical way to get around town especially if you have an old used electric car what are the pros and cons well i'm going to cover some of that because i've had this car now for just about two years and in that time i've learned many things and i will say more positive than negative but there definitely are both initially this vehicle had a greater range however things change in time when it comes to electric vehicles and we'll cover that in just a second i bought this vehicle for just over nine thousand dollars and at the time it had around thirty thousand miles on it two years later about fifty thousand miles on it so let's talk about the economics of a vehicle like this originally it had i believe a 90 something mile range when new when i bought it it had just under 90 miles as a regular maximum range and since i've had it it's put 20 000 miles on it it's now showing in the low to mid 80s as its maximum range that's degradation and that's one of the issues that you get especially with these older electric vehicles you will lose range over time especially if you abuse the battery and i have abused the battery i've driven this vehicle in cold weather really cold weather sub freezing weather and its range was crap and then i've driven it extremely hot weather as well once again bad range and it's bad for the batteries these are air cooled batteries they're not powered or heated i should say by a heat pump they're not regulated the same way a lot of modern evs are and that does push that degradation that much further now over time other than the tires the only other thing i've had to do is pay about 100 bucks for some basic maintenance basic basic maintenance like people went over the car and looked at the air conditioner which isn't working particularly well it doesn't blow cold and i don't want to replace it because i'm cheap but i put it up against all the other vehicles i've owned over the course of two years i'm spending hundreds if not even thousands of dollars for maintenance and maintenance fees what have you and this car doesn't require any of that i just replaced the windshield wiper wiper fluid which my daughter uses all the time but that's it i haven't had to do anything else no oil changes no transmission fluid none of that stuff i replace the filter on my own which is by the way a lot cheaper than having somebody do it for you but what about putting up this car against let's say a nissan versa a regular gas vehicle that nissan builds of course that gets remarkably good gas mileage nissan versa the current version let's say its average is around 35 miles per gallon combined let's just say at five dollars a gallon you're going to put in nine gallons let's just say nine okay 45 for one week of driving which is about what it is right all right so then 45 for the next week well that's ninety dollars once you get to the end of the month that's 180 dollars worth of gasoline that you've had to put into your vehicle okay this car as it currently sits at my regular house and i charge i don't charge during peak hours so i try to watch my budget but i do follow it carefully has cost me approximately forty dollars per month to keep this vehicle full of electricity that's a lot cheaper than a gas car now that same nissan versa will have no problems driving from here to los angeles or to las vegas or really anywhere else that's long you know more than say 50 miles this vehicle can't do that easily you have to stop and charge and stop and charge now fortunately there is a little trick that this car has which is something that i think is pretty cool and i'm going to pop the front and show you guys one of the things that i really like you are not able to charge a lot of these older cars on a fast charger however this one does have chatbot there's chad mo say hi chad mo now this is fast charger that nissan is one of the early adopters of and unfortunately not a lot of people are using it they're using other versions of it which is far more popular which works with your j1772 port and then there's an extra port below that's kind of the modern fast charger some people still are using this fortunately the cool thing is if you need it you can still find it here in colorado actually right here in boulder there was a place where i was able to charge this car up in less than 20 minutes and it was almost completely empty it was on a cold winter day which was great that cost me a lot more money by the way using public chargers is very expensive by comparison still cheaper than gas the problem is when you use fast charging too often once again you're going to screw up your battery so between using it in the wrong climates over charging it or charging it often using fast chargers that can severely damage your battery's ability to hold a charge in other words major degradation i know some people who have a 30 kilowatt hour battery and can only get about 50 or even less miles out of that car because they've been fast charging it and using it in cold conditions and over charging it modern electric vehicles just slightly newer than the nissan leaf the old one are far better at managing battery power and the reason why is because they're actually using intelligence to manage that power over time it'll be i suspect it'll get even better but the trade-off really is there in a couple years this car's battery is not going to hold the charge it currently holds now and right now it's already lost two bars out of 12. according to nissan if i lose x amount of bars i believe it's either three or four bars then it's still covered under warranty just for the next couple years that means that they'll either repair or replace the battery however by the time i actually go in there when i'm low on that charge i can almost guarantee you it'll be past the warranty date and that goes true for a lot of other vehicles out there so nissan leafs are very cheap to get even right now even in today's economy however you have to keep in mind the fact that you are going to lose range especially compared to some of the more modern vehicles out there that compete with it on the other side of it though if you have a short commute it's so much cheaper to drive this one final thing i wanted to tell you before i leave when we bring this home and when my kids not using it both my wife and i driving around driving all around our community i should say all the time to the grocery store to the bookstore to the movies and it's saving us a ton of money because as uvarium will know gas is extremely expensive so this is a little bit of a conversation between you and i i wanted to give you that two year update on the vehicle i hope i covered enough points for you guys to decide whether or not you want to get yourself a used electric vehicle there are better choices out there honestly i wanted a chevy bolt over this but it was a little too expensive out of my price range but it has a much better range although this one doesn't have the same former issues as that one right all right guys thanks for joining me at tflevee i'll see you guys next time

Channel: TFLEV

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Id: egdSG_Fpibk

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 13 2022