I’ve had this 2019 Nissan Leaf e+ imported by EV City in Christchurch for two years. It’s much filthier now and has almost 80,000km clocked. It’s the mid-level trim which Nissan NZ doesn’t sell with ProPilot and one pedal driving.
It’s got a 62kWh battery and we got a 7kW charger when we bought it so we can charge it overnight at home. The standard plug in 3kW charger would take over 24hrs.
It’s also got the much peppier 160kW motor to deal with it’s 1760kg curb weight.
Ask me things ;)
Range is awesome, on paper it reckons it'll do 370km on a full charge and it usually does _more_ than that, though I think it claiming 405km is optimistic. Like most EVs you pay attention to the range as you drive, not what it said at the start of the trip.
We chose this specific model because it can do the 115km from Foxton to Wellington and back (230km round trip) in a single charge, recharge overnight from 11pm to 7am and be ready to do it again the next day. That's about 40kWh per trip!
The upgraded motor is very excellent at 160kW, about 214bhp in old money, has about 360nm torque, I think that's 16 mongooses per acre in Imperial. This makes it close to a medium sized V6 ICE engine in a midsized hatchback. Much vroom.
It does not care about the steep grades in Transmission Gully and sticks to the speed you set on the cruise control.
Yes, use the cruise control. Always. It uses much less go juice than you do, and increases the range a lot.
It's got adaptive cruise control that's very capable and can handle most roads, while it can drive itself it's a very whiney robot and hands steering back to you like a sulky teen occasionally... depending on how well the road is marked. It's very good at managing speed and follow distance* though.
It gets very cranky and will disable cruise control if you take your hands off the wheel.
* it can see motorbikes about 80% of the time. Shiny chrome things can confuse it.
@Aethylred
Are you charging to 100% or 80% (our old 2014 Leaf defaults to charging to 80% unless we tell it specially, which nominally gets us 105km on the meter, but loses a lot to Poneke hills. It’s still perfect for 95% of our driving needs)
After two years of zoom, what sort of battery degradation are you seeing?
(Would it be rude to ask what you paid for it?)
@ulf At home on the 7kW charger it charges to 100% every time, and then turns on the AC/Heater to be ready to go at 7am (on especially cold days it turns on the steering wheel heater). The return trip to Wellington takes it down to 20-25% (80-120km range remaining)
So far, no battery degradation. I had it serviced a couple weeks back and they said "whatever you're doing keep doing that", though I suspect hooking up a battery health app would show something between 90-95%
@ulf As for dollars, we paid $52k plus another $3k to get the charger and have it installed, all financed mortgage rates
We got an Evnex charger because they're NZ made, but a bit overkill for our needs feature-wise as they didn't have their home charger available back then. Don't get the one with a wired cable, you don't know what plug your _next_ EV has.
Aethylred
Hamish Mack 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
ulf