Leafers wanna know:
How far does it really go?
I've heard that question more than once. The answer of course is "It Depends!"
One thing I've picked up on is how much range you give up to go faster.
After a couple highway tests I've come up with the following yardstick/example:
72 mph is 25% faster than 58 mph.
However, when you actually measure you find that 72 mph costs 50% more energy than 58 mph.
And in fact, the 107 mile EPA spec range Leaf only goes around 65-70 miles at 75 mph, and that's on a good day!
I have a somewhat standard bi-weekly jaunt that ends up being 105-109 miles, depending on how much running around I do up there. Very little elevation gain/loss. ~40 mi. of freeway, 20 mi. of secondary and about 10 miles of 'local'. It's consistent enough that it should make a good test of the effects of hot and cold and speed and wind. With any luck I'll be back to edit this as things unfold over the winter. Right now we're working the summer 'baseline.'
It would sure look like this is the perfect assignment for a car with an EPA rated 107 mile range.
Except "There's like 'reality' dude!" and reality is maybe not so kind as nicely controlled EPA tests. Which is why I made sure there were several charge stations along the route. In the real world you can't run the pack down to zero, both for the pack longevity and to avoid tow-trucks. You kinda have to plan to have at least 10 miles of range left over at the end.
Add that to the fact that the Battery Management System (BMS) won't let you charge all the way to a 'real 100% or let you discharge it to Zero. There's roughly one KiloWatt-hour (KWh) left at each end and that ten miles is another ~3 KWh, so now our 30 KWh pack has something like 25-26KWh usable.
You don't see a MPG display on an electric car, Duh. There is no Gallons to be 'per' of. Instead you see KWh per 100 km elsewhere and usually Miles per KWh in the U.S. That 107 mile EPA range translates into roughly 3.8 miles/KWh, of course that's with me getting home just as it reaches zero. In the real world we'll have to hit more like 4.2 miles/KWh to hit the goals.
From a couple extended tests of 30 miles or so, I know that at a constant 58 mph in 80-85 deg.F temps and no significant prevailing wind, tires at 46 psi and no AC use I can consistently hit 5 miles/KWh. Since we have 100 miles that could be covered at a constant 58, it should take 100/5 or 20 KWh to do that part of the trip. Let's assume the 10 miles of slower running around in town is similarly efficient. That's another two 5's or 2 KWh. Total of 22. Hey, this could actually work!
...according to like math and science and estimates n'stuff...
"So hey, why would you want to go that slow?"
On this example trip it takes about 12 min. additional (6 min each way) to drive 60 instead of 70-72 mph on the freeway section. It costs about 18-20 min, to get off the road and get a fast charge. If the trip can be completed on one charge you can save 5 min. or so overall by driving slower. Counter-intuitive much?
09/03/17
Start: 100% charge, 91 deg.F
108 miles traveled. mostly at 62 mph with some AC use.
End: 18 miles of range showing, 10% of the battery remaining. 4.4 miles/KWh
So in this case a pretty good match with theory, and implies that it could have gone 125 miles.
[Since I know I can get it to 6 miles/KWh at around 45 mph, I'm pretty sure 160 miles is possible. Too bad I don't have that much patience.]
Thursday, August 31, 2017
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
I Leaf, ergo sum
OK after that rah-rah post about the amazing deals on close-out Nissan Leafs, it was time to Leaf or get off the pot.
One thing that didn't come up in the Leaf deals post was the intense competition in the Leasing business. I'm not usually a big fan of Leasing since you often pay just almost what the buyers pay and at the end you have nothing to show for it. However there are times when that doesn't apply, like when you're waiting for a Tesla?
Well, not in this case: This is more about the insane lease deals flying around, and the very rapid depreciation of these "Technology Products masquerading as a car", and especially the tax consequences. Lets take those in order.
Insane stock/pricing (see previous post) pressure is generating some awesome loss-leader leasing advertising on 2017 Leafs in the Seattle area. The ad that finally got us in came from here:
The listed numbers were actually a bit higher but after talking to their Internet Sales Department (Thanks Sarah!) it settled out to around $3990 initially and at least 23 payments of $67/mo.
WA has no tax on EV's and the Oregon licensing is over $300 cheaper than WA. Yes you do have to sign up with NMAC, Nissan's finance arm to get the deal, but that's no hardship since it's so close to 0% effective interest you can't (literally) tell the difference. Why "at least"? well, historically NMAC has almost always (~95% of the time) allowed lease-holders to extend the lease for another six months. In this case since the monthly payment is so low it might be a bit more per month for that last six months. Regardless We're planning to keep it for 30 months if possible. I figure a lease by totaling the initial down plus all the monthlies and then divide by the number of months to generate an 'equivalent monthly payment' kinda like you were buying with zero down. In this case it's around $220/mo. (or $195 if for 30 months). The other dealers in the area were around $250/mo. Not horrible, but this place was better. The people were great too. Also they had like 20-30 rows of Leafs on the lot, two deep. Quite the selection. Note we are in no way associated with this dealer or the people therein other than as a satisfied customer.
So about that depreciation. In mid-2015 I looked at used-vs-new Leafs for a friend of mine. Some of this is in an earlier post. At that time the 2013's were coming off lease and selling (mostly in California) for around $13-15K. New those same cars were $31-35K minus the federal credit of $7.5K, so they depreciated $11-14K in roughly 30 months. Yep, that's about $400 per month. Just in depreciation. Must have gotten better since then though, right? Nope, in the summer of 2017 I looked at 2015's coming off lease. Depreciation calculated out to the same numbers, give-or-take thirty bucks or so. I think it's going to be even worse with the 150mi range redesigned and somewhat cooler 2018 Leaf coming out.
Somehow this makes me quite OK with spending $195/mo. and letting someone else take the depreciation hit. Besides, since my old iMiev can't do my current commute (60 mi. range and no fast charging) and the gas car was burning through around $120+/month. My net loss looks small from that perspective alone. The new Leaf has around 100 miles range and comes with two years of free 30 min. fast charging at several of the national EV Charging station chains. They give you an EZ-Charge card with the car. Two of these chargers just happen to be on my route. I may need to charge 15 min. per day to make it home. Then the bulk of the charging happens here.
Taxes: The $7500 federal tax credit is really only applicable if you have $7500 in federal tax liability after all the other deductions. I'm not going to have that much. If I actually purchased the car I'd be leaving about $5000 on the table. However if you lease, the leasing company gets the $7500 and figures it into the price reduction they offer up front.
Add to this; Oregon just passed a $2500 direct credit for purchasers and/or leasers of new EV's registered (but not necessarily bought) in Oregon whose total price us under $50K. There is no tax liability requirement. You have 6 months to get your paperwork in. Will they have the whole program running in Feb.2018? Will I qualify for rules that haven't even been completely written yet? Who knows. However if I do qualify I'm looking at $2500 off that initial $3900 and the effective equivalent rate drops to around $150/mo. I can live with that.
Yep, here's the new toy getting a charge (finally) at Woodland WA on the way home from Seattle. It did the whole 330 mile trip with only 3 stops for charging. ~30 min each. Well except this one in Woodland. We took advantage of our new EZ-Charge card that they gave us with the car that allows you free 30 min. fast charges at AV/Aeroviornment, EVgo, BLink and ChargePoint charging stations. Basically every type we see around here except SemaConnect. The big white and green round ones you may have seen as part of the Washington/Oregon Pacific Coast Electric Highway program are included. So we scheduled our route/timing on the way home to hit all of those different types and thus try them out. We have used 'L2' level charging at AV and BLink stations before with the earlier EV. This was a chance to try out fast charging and some other providers.
When we started south we were expecting to go 60-70 miles (at highway speeds) between charges. When we got to our first stop after driving 73 miles (in Tumwater at the AV station) we had 34 miles available still showing on the display. Way better than expected. So at that stop we re-figured the other stops. The EZ-Charge app for the phone (a specialized version of the PlugShare app that only shows Leaf compatible charging) is very useful for this, although the route planning isn't great. Google maps works great for that though. Anyway we got it down to two more stops to get home, assuming 80 miles per leg was feasible.
The fast chargers only pump in about 80% of the maximum possible charge so as not to hurt the battery. 80% of the theoretical 107 mile range should get us there even with AC running, right? It did, though it was close in the end. The EVgo station shown above in Woodland WA at the Walmart wouldn't work. 'Card Blocked' it said. Turns out the data interface between EZ-Charge and EVgo had been broken for a week and there was no ETA for getting it fixed. As you might imagine, that caused their phone support to get horribly backed up. After waiting on hold for 15 min. I just gave up and fed the machine my credit card. About 15 min. into the charge we finally talked to someone who explained all this and offered to start the charger (that was almost already done) for us. Thanks but no thanks. The charger kicked-out a little early, possibly because the batteries were getting to their thermal limits on a warm day. I wasn't going to call them again to try and restart though. Next stop Keizer OR.
We pulled into the BLink CHAdeMo charger in Keizer (just north of Salem) and one of the two chargers there worked, just like it said in the user comments section of the EZ-Charge app. 29 min. and off we go. However higher speeds (initially) and headlights on meant we arrived home just as the display went from 8 miles remaining to flashing dashes "low battery" warning. I probably should have charged a little more in Keizer. Live and learn. Hey it was only 74 miles supposedly. What could go wrong...
Big shout out to Jonathan, the owner of the dealership, who we got to talk to for about 30 min, and Haakon and especially Simon on the (non-commissioned!!) sales team. They were great to work with. Also Sarah and Jordan in the internet sales office who were very nice too.
One thing that didn't come up in the Leaf deals post was the intense competition in the Leasing business. I'm not usually a big fan of Leasing since you often pay just almost what the buyers pay and at the end you have nothing to show for it. However there are times when that doesn't apply, like when you're waiting for a Tesla?
Well, not in this case: This is more about the insane lease deals flying around, and the very rapid depreciation of these "Technology Products masquerading as a car", and especially the tax consequences. Lets take those in order.
Insane stock/pricing (see previous post) pressure is generating some awesome loss-leader leasing advertising on 2017 Leafs in the Seattle area. The ad that finally got us in came from here:
 |
| Kirkland Nissan, near Seattle |
WA has no tax on EV's and the Oregon licensing is over $300 cheaper than WA. Yes you do have to sign up with NMAC, Nissan's finance arm to get the deal, but that's no hardship since it's so close to 0% effective interest you can't (literally) tell the difference. Why "at least"? well, historically NMAC has almost always (~95% of the time) allowed lease-holders to extend the lease for another six months. In this case since the monthly payment is so low it might be a bit more per month for that last six months. Regardless We're planning to keep it for 30 months if possible. I figure a lease by totaling the initial down plus all the monthlies and then divide by the number of months to generate an 'equivalent monthly payment' kinda like you were buying with zero down. In this case it's around $220/mo. (or $195 if for 30 months). The other dealers in the area were around $250/mo. Not horrible, but this place was better. The people were great too. Also they had like 20-30 rows of Leafs on the lot, two deep. Quite the selection. Note we are in no way associated with this dealer or the people therein other than as a satisfied customer.
So about that depreciation. In mid-2015 I looked at used-vs-new Leafs for a friend of mine. Some of this is in an earlier post. At that time the 2013's were coming off lease and selling (mostly in California) for around $13-15K. New those same cars were $31-35K minus the federal credit of $7.5K, so they depreciated $11-14K in roughly 30 months. Yep, that's about $400 per month. Just in depreciation. Must have gotten better since then though, right? Nope, in the summer of 2017 I looked at 2015's coming off lease. Depreciation calculated out to the same numbers, give-or-take thirty bucks or so. I think it's going to be even worse with the 150mi range redesigned and somewhat cooler 2018 Leaf coming out.
Somehow this makes me quite OK with spending $195/mo. and letting someone else take the depreciation hit. Besides, since my old iMiev can't do my current commute (60 mi. range and no fast charging) and the gas car was burning through around $120+/month. My net loss looks small from that perspective alone. The new Leaf has around 100 miles range and comes with two years of free 30 min. fast charging at several of the national EV Charging station chains. They give you an EZ-Charge card with the car. Two of these chargers just happen to be on my route. I may need to charge 15 min. per day to make it home. Then the bulk of the charging happens here.
Taxes: The $7500 federal tax credit is really only applicable if you have $7500 in federal tax liability after all the other deductions. I'm not going to have that much. If I actually purchased the car I'd be leaving about $5000 on the table. However if you lease, the leasing company gets the $7500 and figures it into the price reduction they offer up front.
Add to this; Oregon just passed a $2500 direct credit for purchasers and/or leasers of new EV's registered (but not necessarily bought) in Oregon whose total price us under $50K. There is no tax liability requirement. You have 6 months to get your paperwork in. Will they have the whole program running in Feb.2018? Will I qualify for rules that haven't even been completely written yet? Who knows. However if I do qualify I'm looking at $2500 off that initial $3900 and the effective equivalent rate drops to around $150/mo. I can live with that.
Yep, here's the new toy getting a charge (finally) at Woodland WA on the way home from Seattle. It did the whole 330 mile trip with only 3 stops for charging. ~30 min each. Well except this one in Woodland. We took advantage of our new EZ-Charge card that they gave us with the car that allows you free 30 min. fast charges at AV/Aeroviornment, EVgo, BLink and ChargePoint charging stations. Basically every type we see around here except SemaConnect. The big white and green round ones you may have seen as part of the Washington/Oregon Pacific Coast Electric Highway program are included. So we scheduled our route/timing on the way home to hit all of those different types and thus try them out. We have used 'L2' level charging at AV and BLink stations before with the earlier EV. This was a chance to try out fast charging and some other providers.
When we started south we were expecting to go 60-70 miles (at highway speeds) between charges. When we got to our first stop after driving 73 miles (in Tumwater at the AV station) we had 34 miles available still showing on the display. Way better than expected. So at that stop we re-figured the other stops. The EZ-Charge app for the phone (a specialized version of the PlugShare app that only shows Leaf compatible charging) is very useful for this, although the route planning isn't great. Google maps works great for that though. Anyway we got it down to two more stops to get home, assuming 80 miles per leg was feasible.
The fast chargers only pump in about 80% of the maximum possible charge so as not to hurt the battery. 80% of the theoretical 107 mile range should get us there even with AC running, right? It did, though it was close in the end. The EVgo station shown above in Woodland WA at the Walmart wouldn't work. 'Card Blocked' it said. Turns out the data interface between EZ-Charge and EVgo had been broken for a week and there was no ETA for getting it fixed. As you might imagine, that caused their phone support to get horribly backed up. After waiting on hold for 15 min. I just gave up and fed the machine my credit card. About 15 min. into the charge we finally talked to someone who explained all this and offered to start the charger (that was almost already done) for us. Thanks but no thanks. The charger kicked-out a little early, possibly because the batteries were getting to their thermal limits on a warm day. I wasn't going to call them again to try and restart though. Next stop Keizer OR.
We pulled into the BLink CHAdeMo charger in Keizer (just north of Salem) and one of the two chargers there worked, just like it said in the user comments section of the EZ-Charge app. 29 min. and off we go. However higher speeds (initially) and headlights on meant we arrived home just as the display went from 8 miles remaining to flashing dashes "low battery" warning. I probably should have charged a little more in Keizer. Live and learn. Hey it was only 74 miles supposedly. What could go wrong...
Big shout out to Jonathan, the owner of the dealership, who we got to talk to for about 30 min, and Haakon and especially Simon on the (non-commissioned!!) sales team. They were great to work with. Also Sarah and Jordan in the internet sales office who were very nice too.
Saturday, August 5, 2017
An Economic oddity: New Nissan Leaf for $12K?
Oregon, forget that Tesla, how'bout a new Nissan Leaf for around $12K?
A confluence of interesting events. Some of this is smoke and mirrors so bear with me.
Several things have happened recently which when added together could produce historic low prices for the Leaf in Oregon. Lets look at them in order, more or less.
1. Nissan announces they will reveal the new, completely redesigned 2018 Nissan Leaf in September.
2. Oregon legislature approves bill rebating $2500 toward an EV purchase (and possibly another $2500 if you meet certain low income/scrap a clunker tests), Inception date: October 6th, 2017.
3. Nissan starts allowing 'big deal' dealer incentives to get the 2017 Leafs out of the way with the killer 2018 model coming. The ones announced so far are between $10K and $12K. Now, is that kind of juice gonna be available on the car you want here? Hard to tell, but the listing prices at Oregon dealers have dropped from around $32K 5 months ago to $27-28K today. Gotta like that trajectory.
4. The $7500 Federal tax credit still applies, assuming you have that much tax liability, although Nissan should blow through their 200,000 unit limit some time in late 2018.
A 2017 Leaf (with the upgraded 107 mi. range battery) has a base around $31K. The High Speed Charging Package (you really want this) adds $1500 or so.
A $10.5K incentive brings us to $22K. ...which is the price you'd hopefully pay going out the door.
The Oregon rebate gets you $2500 in 60-90 days.
The Federal credit gets you $7500 next year,
Our total is now right at $12K!
If you qualify as 'Moderate Income' (whatever that means) and have a 20 year old junker around that you want to scrap then you might qualify for another $2500. Sounds like slim odds.
YMMV Your mileage may vary. I'm not claiming that this won't require hard bargaining on your part.
You might have to venture into Washington to find a car to buy. There's a lot of stock there.
[Edit: I just had a look on Cars.com and there was something like 20 2017 Leafs in Colorado under $20K already. Now is there some kinda fine print that makes that price unavailable to out-of-state buyers? Beats me. It's still a great trend. I couldn't find anything in the Oregon rebate bill language that says it must be purchased in Oregon, just that it must be registered there.
Oops, that's only for certain electric customers. My bad.]
Edit2: Forget Colorado, Washington has something like 500 2017 Leafs in stock across the state as a whole. ...several months worth. Large stock, impending model-year shake-up. It's getting to be a buyer's paradise up there. Pretty much everybody in the Seattle area is offering at least $10K off and some more like 12K off (assuming financing through Nissan which accounts for $4K of that, but hey you can pay it off after the first month if you want, but why would you want to if you're getting it at 0.0000037% ?? Yes that was a real world interest rate example from a real dealer.)
A confluence of interesting events. Some of this is smoke and mirrors so bear with me.
Several things have happened recently which when added together could produce historic low prices for the Leaf in Oregon. Lets look at them in order, more or less.
1. Nissan announces they will reveal the new, completely redesigned 2018 Nissan Leaf in September.
2. Oregon legislature approves bill rebating $2500 toward an EV purchase (and possibly another $2500 if you meet certain low income/scrap a clunker tests), Inception date: October 6th, 2017.
3. Nissan starts allowing 'big deal' dealer incentives to get the 2017 Leafs out of the way with the killer 2018 model coming. The ones announced so far are between $10K and $12K. Now, is that kind of juice gonna be available on the car you want here? Hard to tell, but the listing prices at Oregon dealers have dropped from around $32K 5 months ago to $27-28K today. Gotta like that trajectory.
4. The $7500 Federal tax credit still applies, assuming you have that much tax liability, although Nissan should blow through their 200,000 unit limit some time in late 2018.
A 2017 Leaf (with the upgraded 107 mi. range battery) has a base around $31K. The High Speed Charging Package (you really want this) adds $1500 or so.
A $10.5K incentive brings us to $22K. ...which is the price you'd hopefully pay going out the door.
The Oregon rebate gets you $2500 in 60-90 days.
The Federal credit gets you $7500 next year,
Our total is now right at $12K!
If you qualify as 'Moderate Income' (whatever that means) and have a 20 year old junker around that you want to scrap then you might qualify for another $2500. Sounds like slim odds.
YMMV Your mileage may vary. I'm not claiming that this won't require hard bargaining on your part.
You might have to venture into Washington to find a car to buy. There's a lot of stock there.
[Edit: I just had a look on Cars.com and there was something like 20 2017 Leafs in Colorado under $20K already. Now is there some kinda fine print that makes that price unavailable to out-of-state buyers? Beats me. It's still a great trend. I couldn't find anything in the Oregon rebate bill language that says it must be purchased in Oregon, just that it must be registered there.
Oops, that's only for certain electric customers. My bad.]
Edit2: Forget Colorado, Washington has something like 500 2017 Leafs in stock across the state as a whole. ...several months worth. Large stock, impending model-year shake-up. It's getting to be a buyer's paradise up there. Pretty much everybody in the Seattle area is offering at least $10K off and some more like 12K off (assuming financing through Nissan which accounts for $4K of that, but hey you can pay it off after the first month if you want, but why would you want to if you're getting it at 0.0000037% ?? Yes that was a real world interest rate example from a real dealer.)
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