The two year Leaf ePlus report:

 The Nissan Leaf S ePlus 62KWh EV is two years old this week. (edit 2024: year 3 added)

Hows it going?      Really good!

Edit: Mid-2024: End of the saga and financial/buying analysis added way down at the bottom of the post:

If you've been following the posts, it's been doing day-to-day travel plus weekend outings and car trips to (almost) the Canadian border  and the Mexican border. Other than a couple hiccups with non-functional public chargers along the way (documented in those posts) there's been absolutely no problems. Pretty good for the little car that 'couldn't (according to a number of 'EV Experts' out there.) Yes it's not a Tesla, but for half the money, it's more than half as good ;-)
Edit 2024: Now that a used Tesla is very close to the same price as an equivalent used Leaf, it's hard to recommend the Leaf unless you have found a nice earlier one for cheap ($6-7K) as a local-only commuter.

Stats: 30,892 miles total. (edit 2024: 44962 at the end of lease)

Problems, Service Visits, Repairs, Broken stuff: None.

Public charge stops: 28, totaling ~1000KWh and around $100 (see posts, we cheat!)

Home charges ~185 for about 7500KWh. Roughly 3.7 Miles/KWh average.

At our home electric rate of 9.2 cents/KWh this represents a bill of $690. Yes this does not include the $28/mo. 'connection fee' which we would be paying regardless, it just reflects the additional power purchase rate. Electricity/fuel costs:  over-all total of roughly $800 or 2.5 cents/mile.

Not much else to say. At reasonable speeds. ie: Not trying to go 75MPH all the time (it's amazing how much more efficient it is at 68) it still goes 220 miles plus on a full charge. Longest was around 240 mi.  under nearly ideal conditions (summer, 65 mph, no serious headwinds) with 15 to go to 'empty' even then. Shortest under non ideal (near freezing, blowing, pouring rain, heater, defrost, freeway speeds, mountain passes) was about 160 miles. If there's any battery degradation we can't see it yet.

In honor of it's two year birthday it went over the coast range passes to the Oregon Coast Aquarium and back. 200 miles, 54 deg.F intermittent showers and the guess-o-meter showed 40 miles range remaining at the end.
Photos therefrom:

Hey, folks complain there's not enough pictures. Here ya go. ;-)

OK, here's the update and 'end analysis' on the third Leaf. As expected it's not a bad story, just not as awesome (free driving is rare ;-) as the first two. See Driving 50K Miles for Free.
As stated, the Oregon Rebate covered most of the $3K down payment, including the fees, licensing - etc. Total remaining plus the $229/mo. over 36 months and 45K miles plus end-of-lease fees came to -just- barely under $10K.
...or just at 22 cents/mile. Once insurance and electricity and two tires ($186, yes they were awful tires, but that's the Grand Total for our maintenance expenses) are added we're still under 28 cents/mile. Compared with national averages (50-60 cents/mi.) this is still a pretty good number.
The alternative was to buy it out ($18.2K) but with used prices having node-dived for all used cars, and especially EV's post-Covid it was effectively only worth around $14K as a private party sale.
This, plus the opportunity to evaluate wether a car is worth keeping, is the whole point of leasing a vehicle IMHO. The car was doing great. Battery degradation was reasonable (6-8% at a guess) and CCS to CHaDeMo charging adapters are finally available, granted at $600+. But even with a clunky adapter you're still charging slowly, and as you'll see elsewhere on this blog a one-year-newer Tesla Model 3 is $15K. It's a no brainer. Nissan Finance can have it back.
Just as a side note to Nissan: If they had put a CCS fast charging port on it and dropped the buy-out by a couple thousand, we'd have thought really hard about keeping it. Neither of those happened and we didn't.

If you can pick up even the shorter range 2018-2022 Nissan Leaf used for under $10K (which qualifies for partial Federal, and in some cases State rebates/credits, so say $6-7K all in) we still regard them as an absolutely great local/commuter car.   They really have worked the bugs out and the batteries seem to be holding up well on the late 2013 and later models. From our experience we wouldn't recommend going earlier than 2018 unless you're really strapped for cash.

Rumors: a lifetime of battery life rumors.

OK, stupid title, but you're here aren't you?  ;-)
This is a short update on the history and expectations regarding the life expectancy of EV Batteries. Since they're expensive to replace you REALLY want good news on this front. Also, arguments about "How much more materials are needed to make an EV" have been debunked.

We've gone on at length about the various EV battery chemistries, expected life trade-offs and how to Care for certain types to maximize their chronological and cycle life. This isn't just theoretical, as our 2012 Mitsubishi iMiev turned 50K miles and 10 years old in the last few months.  It started out with 70 miles of 'around town' (ie: non-highway miles) range when new and it still does around 60, a loss of 15% or so. It recently did 48 miles on the freeway and returned with at least a little range left. 
Obviously a single datapoint like this isn't all that useful, nor is the fact that this single model had under 5% of the units experience battery failure during the ten years they've been out in the wild.
However it does point out that even battery chemistries from 10-12 years ago can have a relatively long and useful life and, we're now on the 4th upgrade/revision of EV cell types, with the latest (LFP) expected to last beyond 250,000 miles and 20 years.

As usual, click for bigger image

We removed the 'Official Battery Recalls' from the first graph since it skewed the remaining data all out of shape. Left it in the other one because it's important to see what a single production error on a single type of LG Battery cells (used, obviously, by Chevy and Hyundai) can have on the replacement rates. The above includes both in warranty and out.

Unpacking this a bit: Absent recalls and the higher failure rate in the 2011 Leaf, NOBODY has failure rates above 4% and the average is just below 1% by unit volume.  (the 2011 Leaf was the very first EV battery on the road with a total of about 10,000 units produced of which under 1000 have failed. Four times as many produced in 2012 and they obviously learned a thing or 2x)

As you might imagine, the longer a vehicle has been on the road the more likely failure is. Data from 2011-2015 is almost entirely Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model S and Mitsubishi iMiev since they were the only EVs available in volume during that time. If you remove those years, to more accurately compare with later models, the Model S and Leaf cumulative failure rates drop well below 2%.

There is no reason to assume the Model Y that's only been out for two years will continue to post awesome numbers, but given Tesla's history, there's no reason to assume it will get worse.

Don't forget that the lowest battery warranty we've seen is 8 years, 100K miles. That means that over 90% of the total EV's out there are still under warranty. The manufacturers are Really Keen to not be replacing batteries under warranty. Sure the numbers might get a bit worse after ten years on the road, but how many of you actually keep a car for say, 12 years? And should you happen to be buying a used one you have a bunch of years of real world failure history to look at. Also recall that the expected/projected cell life has been improving by over 10% per year, so our projection is a failure rate below 1% for a ten year life going forward.