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:

Kirkland Nissan, near Seattle

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.