The Tesla conundrum, again...

 We've gone on and on about Teslas being way too expensive. Maybe not so much any more. 

[Edit: Feb'24:There's an update (way) below.] and now:

Edit Mar'24: We Came, We Saw, They Conquered, so yeah we went to the Tesla Store.

Justin shows us a 2024 'Refreshed' Model 3

...and we REALLY liked the '24 Model 3. We like the seats, the ride, the style, the wheels, the quiet, pretty much everything about it except the price. Looked up after we got home and - roughly $42K for the absolutely base model including the 'bakes in the sun' color. And it doesn't qualify for squat in terms of Fed & State credits/rebates -except- maybe if they just happen to get the new 'in demand' unit to us in time for the Oregon rebates timeline [Apr.3rd - June.6th] and even that's not enough given what's happened with depreciation recently.

We also tried the '24 Model Y, gotta say: it's nice too and a better color. Not AS nice you understand, but still pretty darn good. ...and it qualifies for everything so it's a bunch cheaper. 

     Well, except for how Tesla deals with their end-of-quarter sales rush.  

The Tesla sales advisors there at the Salem OR Store [Justin and the crew there were really really nice BTW] were very up front and realistic that there's no way to order a car (inventory or otherwise) with the promise that you won't have to pick it up before Apr.3rd, and since Apr.2nd (or before) costs us over $7K more than Apr.3rd, we're somewhat sensitive to the date. It's great to get straight answers even if it's not what you wanted to hear. This despite their own Tesla Order Agreement that you have to sign or agree to plainly stating that you have 14 days to pick it up (page one, paragraph four 'Delivery' toward the end of tha paragraph, when delivered in PDF form). Oh well.

We can also note that it is a bad business practice to have end of the quarter (or end of month) 'big sales' pushes. It undermines trust in the business and generates unfair outcomes, both for the customers and, like having the sales folks bear the weight of failures far up the corporate ladder. Most especially including executives that benefit from those sales numbers.

Hertz update: They are raising prices on their sales EV's, pushing many above the $25K cutoff for Fed. credits. Odd that this happens just after the top management blamed for those low prices were pushed out of the company. Maybe it's all coincidence.

____________________________________

Anyway, back to the original story already in progress:

Hertz bought a lot of Teslas beginning in 2021. They're scaling back some, plus they just tend to sell off their rental cars as used when they're 2-3 years and 80K miles old, just in the process of normal business. We had not really been paying attention to this until recently when it was pointed out that many of them are now low enough (under $25K) to qualify for the Federal Used EV Tax Credit of $4000.

From (obviously) the Hertz Car Sales sites across the country

Let's see, $20K minus $4K = $16K. Awesome! Well except the 80K 'hard rental miles' on them. Normally a deal breaker for must folks, except there's several differences from 'normal' expectations:

Tesla Model 3's don't generally have problems with big failures like motors/batteries until well beyond 250K mi. (yes, yes, there's lots of LOUD exceptions out there, but not so much statistically speaking) so that part isn't as big a deal as you might think.

And,
You have the remainder of the 8 year 100K mi. power-train and battery Tesla warranty PLUS Hertz adds a 12 mo. general warranty. This should get you through your initial worries about the problems it 'came with.'

They didn't limit themselves to 2021's either. A slightly more limited selection of 2022's is out there:

Searched for: 2022, low miles. "39 cars match your search"

In this example they're about $4K more money but one year newer and 20K fewer miles. Worth it? For some people. There are also examples in-between: $23K cars that are 2022 but higher miles.
Two things worth mentioning: Most of the vehicles that racked up over 60K miles in a year were out on the special weekly rental program for Uber drivers, who were incentivized to take good care of the cars. Second, Hertz does not sell the damaged, either accident or cosmetically challenged, cars through it's site. Since their 'rep' and risks associated with the 'free' warranty they include are on the line, they send the questionable cars off to auction. This doesn't mean they're perfect, but better than you would expect.

Early Teslas that spent a lot of their time on Supercharger/Fast DC chargers had somewhat higher than normal battery degradation. Is that still a thing? Well, sort of. Some of the overblown headlines have been debunked. The not unusual case of extrapolation from inadequate data ... that just happens to prove your point ;-) 
But some of it was real, although less so recently. Tesla is a data company. The things they learn are quickly sent out to update the behavior of both the cars and chargers. Add to which most of the 2022's have LFP battery packs. We've waxed rhapsodic about the benefits of Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries before, especially their long cycle life even in fast charging conditions. Some LFP units in the field have seen only 2%-3% degredation over their first 18 mo. compared with 5%-6% for the 'normal' NCA chemistries under similar conditions.
For us this easily makes the 2022's worth the additional $$'s. 

"So, you're going out to get one?"
Not so fast. There's one alternate path (Model Y below) and a couple flies/delays in the ointment.

The first of which is that none of them are in Oregon. Most that are 'near' are in California. Hundreds of them. Given that we haven't hesitated to buy outside the state (twice in WA) you'd think "Eh, no big deal." but CA is a special case. If we 'take delivery' there we're charged the full weight of state and local taxes. $2000-$2500, plus a grand in fees that we may only partially avoid since we're registering in OR.

"So there's gotta be a way around that." Well, maybe.

It's in theory possible to have the car you buy trucked up to Portland and then 'take delivery' there. That costs around $1500 and they seem resistant to this path. Maybe, we'll see. The other option might be to rent the vehicle (special rate $65/day) and drive it up from SandyEggo or wherever and then 'buy' it in Portland. We're not opposed to this approach at all. Great real-world testing followed by $1500 less/off. However this does NOT match how their process(s) work, so certainly an uphill battle.

This brings up a second reason for delay:

The Oregon EV Rebate. As many people are aware Oregon offers a $2500 EV rebate on new cars, and, that it's on hold since it ran out of funds in Apr.2023. What the public is less aware of is the 'other' $5000 credit, the Charge Ahead rebate. Granted this only applies if your gross taxable income is ~80K and under, but apparently it applies to used EV's as well. It looks like it's worth going through the pre-qualification process and we're headed in that direction once it gets cleared up as to when the program will get funding. Mar.? Apr. '24?
With that the low mile '22's are reaching reasonable prices. $24K-$4K(Fed)-$5K(state) = $16K
Regardless, it's probably worth going through that anyway, 'cause of the next part:

"Hey, wasn't the Model Y the one you were waiting for?"

                  Well, not if it costs $20K more. Duh.     ...but things are changing.

Taken from Tesla's Inventory site. Note units are 'demo' ...couple hundred miles.

However all is not as it appears. If you click on either of these you'll find:

Which is kind of rude. (Referring to the "Does not qualify for Federal Tax Credit.").  !!

However if you persist downward and click through each of the listings you'll eventually, with some boredom ...and about 4000 higher prices find one that matches expectations:
Yes, the glorious $7500 Federal  notification you were expecting above. Applied at time of delivery. Yay!

...but with prices clustered around $41.5K-$42K which when you do the math puts you around $34K. Granted that is 2X more than the used $16K example at the top.

                     And that isn't horrible.

But if you happen to qualify for state and/or local rebate(s) and are really patient, another $7500 ($2.5K+$5K) off might happen. Bringing us to more like $27K all in.

Now again granted that is roughly $10K more than the used examples above, but this is for a new, bigger, more 'campable' vehicle with all warranties.  OTOH that is 65% more. Hmmm.

Will it work out, either way? Stay tuned for later posts.

First units on their 'list,'  WITH Fed.Tax.Credit

[Edit: Late Feb.] The Oregon DEQ emailed us last week to say that pre-qualifications are now open, and while they won't say exactly when, the program is likely to go live in late March or early April "For a limited time."

ie: Odds are high that it'll be dead by early May sometime. [Edit: June 3rd.]

That said, the number of available Model 3's at Hertz has been tapering off week over week and there may be nothing (useful) left by the time April rolls around. Does this mean the dream of a 2022 Model 3 LFP for under $16K is dead? Guess we'll see. More later. 

It's Later: Hmmm, that's an interesting twist: The best stock of low(er) mileage used Model3's is in Florida. The twist is that FL has a form you can fill where you only pay the sales tax equal to the state in which you'll be registering the car. That's $0 for Oregon. There's still some fees but even parts of that are deferred to the fact that it will register elsewhere. A somewhat complicated mess of paperwork, but $2000 or more less than California and like 20,000 less miles than many of the CA cars that are under the $25K limit. Hmmm. Plane tickets are $250...

Added later: The next link in the saga.

Just an update or two

The long term inclination here has been to just edit posts and add Updates/Edits as reality shifts going forward. We're finding that only a few people (excepting those dozen or so new readers every year) are actually reading the updates. That's fair. So for the two dozen or so that read only new posts we'll attempt to summarize all that stuff here.    #a number of separate topics.

Aug.'23: Update to  The Crossing Point, showing how all this is tracking predictions. The short answer, really well, especially on a world-wide perspective. U.S. should hit 10% BEV adoption around the end of 2023. That wasn't 'supposed' to happen until 2026 if you listen to U.S. 'authorities.'

June'23: Connecting on Connectors chronicles the mass move to support the Tesla fast charging connector 'NACS' by most of the EV competitors. Turns out having the lowest cost, most reliable and (by far) the highest number of charging stations counts for something.

Apr.'23: For those of you looking for an inexpensive 'local transportation' EV, there's still the option of getting a 2023 Nissan Leaf S for under $30K. We found seven remaining in WA.
"What? That's not a good deal! A ten year old design (granted it's been updated a lot) with only 150 miles of range and an outdated charging port? " 
Uh, what part of "Local Transportation" did you not understand?
Well hold on, it qualifies for (at least right now) the full Federal Tax Credit, -and- various state rebates. For example if you're low enough income in Oregon (under 400% of the federal poverty line) you might get another $7500 off*, for a total of $15,000 off. Like a new car for $15K.
California residents can get $7K off or even more in some circumstances (having enough income to fully qualify for the federal credit -and- the CA Low Income Voucher, [300% of poverty line] is difficult to pull off but could result in car for $10K or so.) so local tax/income situations are a major variable.  Worth looking into though...
                   *You have to purchase/apply before the end of April. So this is dead.

Jan'23-Probably the most important post here ever:  As Go the Batteries, So Goes the Nation. 
There's also a bit there about the application of Wright's Law to the cumulative price decline. Key parts:  

"Note six months later: LFP cells, in quantities of 50,000 are already down around $70/kWh. That makes some of the arguments below even more compelling. Granted that is FOB in China. Tesla and others are near to making the same come true in the US factories. That sounds like a nifty 22% drop. Cool, huh! But don't forget the U.S. allows a $35 per KWh in tax credits to the manufacturers, so that drop cuts the after tax cost of LFP cells IN HALF. This is going to get really interesting ... especially when they get the cost down around $35 in 2025 or 2026. What happens when the most expensive part of your car or home energy storage system has a net cost of Zero Dollars? Boggles the mind.

Way down at the bottom of that post you'll find an addendum about how the cost of LFP cells are declining over time. Hint: It's over 15% per year.. Translation: That's around $60/KWh by mid-late 2024."

This also impacts The Crossing Point, which also has updates unrelated to the above. Including new graphs of how the EV transition might look. Note that there's not much about this 'zero cost' thing included there because we have little idea how that will play out. The macroeconomic effects of a single microeconomic cost variation. Should be an interesting ride.

Jan'23-Last quarter profit numbers for all the big EV players. These are numbers derived from the reports they filed based on world-wide numbers, not just U.S. specific, and includes the top ten manufacturers that have Pure EV's in their lineup. The EV parts of their business are not separated out here so this chart has a lot of gas cars (and profits) in it.

None of these (except Tesla) would be showing positive numbers if profits from EV's ONLY were shown. 

It's interesting to compare the 'Pure EV' players Tesla, Xpeng and Nio. Quite the different story. Several of whom have pointed out that if they could just sell more cars (at a loss) they'd improve their margins (but still loose money one each one sold?)

All of Ford + GM added together have less net profit than Tesla (who is less than a quarter their combined size).

Here is another view of that dynamic now that the 2022 figures are all in. Note that this one is about gross sales volume in the USA. We expect these trends to continue, especially for those who do a bad job of the EV transition, like Honda, Mazda and Toyota

As per usual, click on an image to blow up full size.

Feb'23-Electrify America, an EV Charging vendor mentioned in 2500 miles for Free? has raised their rates by a bunch (15%?) right in the middle of reports that their charge connectors sometimes short out and weld themselves to the vehicle they're attached to. Call the tow truck, or maybe the fire brigade. Oh, and they, it turns out, have used Microsoft Windows, a famously secure, reliable, lightweight operating system to run their charge stations. Oops! Hacking chargers is a thing? Apparently so. Also in what is sure to be unrelated news much of the top management of the company is being rotated out. Turns out they need the money from the increase to pay for thousands more (functional?) charging stations ... and get one-tenth as many as Tesla in operation.

Speaking of Tesla chargers ('Supercharger') in the countries where Tesla is allowing other brands of car to use their charging stations they seem to be beating the snot out of their competition. Lower prices, more reliable, faster, hmmm, can't see why. The Tesla app, which you need to start the charge, instead of advertising you potato chips while you charge your VW, is selling you Teslas. Wonder if that will work? The various other players seem very intent on this not happening in North America. Good luck with that.
There is also an Apr'23 edit of 'Motive, Means and Opportunity' about U.S.Fast Charger instillation rates.

Dec'22-And in the saddest news of this update, the 'Leasing Loophole' appears closed**. The post about this, how people who do not qualify for the FedTaxCredit of $7500 can use the Leassor as a stand-in and gain around $7K when 'buying' the car, was BY FAR the most popular post on this site ever.
This still 'works' if you're actually interested in Leasing. However the whole point of the post was that you would buy out the lease almost immediately, and so get the benefit of the tax credit despite having insufficient taxable income to qualify. What basically happened is the high resale values on used cars during the pandemic plus the high demand for used EVs generally -plus- the now available $4K credit for used EVs has convinced the leasing agencies (Tesla, NMAC, GMAC - etc) to rescind the option to buy out the lease. They make more money on the lease-take-back than they would otherwise. Also, somehow they're convinced that this maintains a higher used car price for their wares. In Tesla's case, this appears to be true. Not so obvious for the others. Bummer though, the little guy gets screwed again.

** Note that Hyundai/KIA are bucking that trend as of late'23, some investigation there might pay off.

Connecting on Connectors

                                     last edit Nov.2023

 Things, they are a'change'n, so don't assume you know all this ;-)

Q: Should which charging connector your next EV uses be the key defining element in the 'Which car to buy' decision?   Maybe not, after all our answer to any question is "It Depends."

Still it is one thing you should keep in mind..

About 80% of you, about 90+% of the time will be charging at home. Even if you're in apartment, many of which are starting to provide charging options, mostly under duress from state and local governments.
If you own your home, then you'll just put in whatever home connector your car uses, or get an adapter for the one you have. EasyPeasy. Except of course there's more to it. Why else would we be boring you with all of this.

While our first three EVs all charged directly off of standard home electrical outlets (we've been at this since the '80's) all the more recent cars, 2012 onward, have used the J1772 plug for home charging. We went into this in some detail back in a post from 2013 and we've been using literally that exact same charging cord since. 10 years on.

Standard J1772 EV charging plug.

So yeah, this has been the standard for over a decade now.  It basically acts as a switch with just enough smarts to switch on the power from the 120v or 240v AC outlet (or grid) you have it plugged into when it recognizes there's a car attached. The actual 'charger' part is in the car. This results in relatively slow charging, but ease of connecting to power.

This is why DC Fast Chargers were developed. They bypass the charger built into the car and actually charge the battery directly. CHAdeMO was the first 'standard' mainly in Japan and in the US used primarily on the Nissan Leaf, the first mass market EV here in 2011.
CCS1 then became the US standard, mainly because the other players didn't want to pay the (ridiculous) fees to the Japanese standards organization. Not Invented Here was also a factor, as was the expense of the overly large complicated CHAdeMO connector. CCS2 is one of the standards in Europe and S.America. China (of course) has their own. That said, the CCS connectors are, comparatively, also large heavy and expensive.

In (partially) response to this Tesla developed NACS*, a smaller lighter cheaper more reliable connector:

CCS (in grey) compared with NACS, both capable of 350Kw charging rates.

Obviously a big size disparity. CCS also weighs over twice as much and is considerably more difficult to handle and insert. The cost is also proportional, CCS being about 2X as much. NACS also handles both AC 'home charging' and DC fast charging with the same connector on the car.
CCS was designed to make money for the companies manufacturing it. NACS was designed for reliability, ease of use, and efficient production ... of both ends, partially because the same company was making both ends -and- the fast chargers -and- the cars attached there-to. To add insult to injury the NACS fast charging  infrastructure "Superchargers" costs a third, or less, to install and have been historically much more reliable as we have documented in earlier posts.

So if this NACS thing is so great how come we aren't using it already?
For starters, 'we' are using it already. Just under 75% of the EV's on US roads are Teslas, and Teslas use this connector. As for the remainder, there are several reasons:
Although Tesla agreed pretty much from the beginning to allow other manufacturer's cars access to the Tesla charging network and opened up their patents (free of charge) to allow that, they did want the other companies to help pay for the literally billions of dollars that charging infrastructure system costs, currently 48,000 stalls world wide.  Hey it's only fair, if they (other car sellers) want the benefits they should help with the costs, no?
However, well established (and prideful) car companies are hardly going to bow down to some irritating upstart in that manner. What would they tell their stockholders? Besides, other companies are going to build out chargers, for profit, without the car companies' having to shell out any $$.
There's also the political angle. The Biden Administration and a number of congress critters have an intense dislike of Tesla, in small part due to them being a non-union shop. Until very recently pretty much all the political noise and invitations to meetings - etc. has gone to GM. They make the right noises, even though their execution has been crap. GM is in what? Sixth? Place in the world on EVs if you remove micro-cars that are china-market only.

So what changed?
Two things. Mainly, FORD figured out that there was no way they were going to compete on the charging side of the equation. They got into extensive negotiations with Tesla over this and agreed to adopt the NACS 'standard' on their vehicles going forward, and are paying some undisclosed amounts now and going forward.
In exchange, the second big thing: Tesla is allowing the FORD App access to the servers/api that authenticate the connection and start the actual charging, and handle the billing. This was a big deal because now FORD is in your face on your phone while you're charging. Imagine the advertising revenue! And data (mis)management. 
Well, and 'brand awareness' despite that fact that you're obviously sitting at a Tesla charger ;-)

GM decided they couldn't afFord (see what we did there? ;-) to be left behind and quickly decided to follow suit. It's almost certain many other Dominoes will Fall. The Biden folks are pretty ticked off and are trying to revise the rules to require CCS on charging stations put in with federal support, despite that not being in the original law. This part  is getting interesting. At this point (late 2023) the ONLY manufacturer that sells into the North American market that has NOT signed on to use NACS as their primary charging connector is Stellantis (Fiat, Chrystler, RAM, JEEP).  Even VW is onboard now.

What about existing CCS equipped cars?
Many existing chargers have both NACS and CCS connectors. See Tesla Magic Dock. Also, equipping charge stations with two cords is do-able if you don't want to go the dockable-adapter route. That's how they support CCS + CHAdeMO now.
On the car owner end of it, adapters are available. This example photo is an NACS to J1772 adapter. It's around $50 on Amazon. Tesla makes a (necessarily much more complicated) CHAdeMO to NACS adapter that's a couple hundred dollars. If a 'standards organization' charges a bunch in licensing fees for you to include their very important standard in your product -or- they have an exclusive manufacturing agreement in place it can push costs up rapidly. Having to do complicated electronics/communication protocols adds costs too. Unfortunately CCS-NACS is, comparatively speaking, relatively difficult, so that will mostly be implemented by having the vehicle manufacturers do the heavy lifting -or- putting both types of plugs on each charging station, which is actually starting to happen. The other charging station companies are not -completely- clueless ;-)

*NACS is called the North American Charging Standard. At least recently. It was previously called the Tesla connector. It is registered with many standards bodies. Most of them don't recognize it as an exclusive north American standard. The SAE still recognizes CCS 'a' US standard. NACS is now an SAE standard as well. Some of the complicated bits, mostly surround auto-recognizing the vehicle and automatically starting charging when plugged in, is still under negotiation. This is no surprise since 'who controls the money' is a more fraught conversation than a physical engineering standard.
Do note that in the "negotiations with other car makers" Tesla is allowing them access to only some (around 60%?) of the Supercharger stations out there. Most of the already congested, by existing Tesla drivers, stations will be excluded, which only makes sense as they're protecting their user base.

Its VHS vs. BETA all over again. Except in this case Beta, the better technology with the worse marketing and extraordinarily irritating pitchman (or NACS in this case) has 75% of the electric cars on the road in the US using it's connector at this time. Yes, Tesla really is that dominant. 

We regard this whole thing as a good deal for almost everyone, especially future electric car drivers. 
The best, most reliable and lowest cost technology wins? Despite political and corporate and 'standards body' headwinds?          ...WhoDaThunkIt?

Final notes: We'd hate to be invested in other charging providers right now. EvGo, Electrify America, ChargePoint... Owie! Competing directly against a provider (Tesla) that has 99.7% uptime, compared with a non-Tesla industry average around 75%,  and historical pricing 30-50% lower -and- who is directly integrated into the Ford and GM apps has got to be difficult.
Investment-wise we're unlikely to jump in with FORD or GM either, even though we do think the above changes should reduce the need for massive government bailouts in the future, even though that probably remains the most likely scenario.
That said: Here are the charging station companies that have announced support for NACS:
ABB/ABM, Blink, Chargepoint, EVgo, FLO, Tritium and Wallbox. While Electrify America is currently absent from this list, they don't build any of the chargers, which are supplied by ABB/ABM and Tritium, so they're likely to follow suit. 
Our only concern with this is the conversion of existing charge stations to NACS. The easiest thing from the charger manufacturer's standpoint is to install a NACS cord on existing stations. The most prevalent 'has two cords' type of stations have CHAdeMO on the second one. It seems probable that CHAdeMO will get phased out leafing the ~200,000+ Leaf drivers in North America in an unpleasant position.

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.