S or SV, which to choose?

[BrockWI]

Or just start with leasing the S and let it be your "learning" BEV car, that's the attitude we went with. Honestly I don't miss carwings, because I never had it, same thing with the heat pump. Although I think I would like the heat pump more than carwings. Honestly the thing I really wish I had was cruise. I can't hold a speed to save my life, which is normally not a problem in any other vehicles with the feedback you get from the engine and other noise, but in the leaf you really have to watch your speed or you end up speeding. I will probably get used to it. On the flip side this car is mostly an around town car so it's not to often I would actually use it anyway. And how much did Nissan save by deleting cruise control in a drive be wire system

If you can get a 24 month lease I would say go for it, hopefully in 24 months Nissan will have a larger battery pack option or at the very least more fun stuff on the car and you will have a lot better idea of what you would like / need

 

[WetEV]

The current Leaf is a throwaway car;

In Florida, perhaps. Not in the Pacific Northwet... I mean Northwest.

 

[AthLeaf]

The current Leaf is a throwaway car; you want to stick with leasing. Don't get lured into a higher payment for frills on a car you're going to hand back to Nissan in the not too distant future anyway, instead just get the cheapest price you can on a base model. JMO.

The Leaf is a throwaway car :?: If it is, I dont want one... Whats up with that :?: :?:

I'm not sure why everyone is so big on leasing. We are planning to buy ours. And for almost nothing... Assuming a $30,000 purchase price, - $7,500 federal and $2,500 state credits (i.e. $10,000 free money), - $12,000 trade on current Mazda3 = $8,000 total to purchase the car.

 

[LTLFTcomposite]

^ Because the batteries lose capacity in warmer climates faster than originally expected. Anecdotal reports from GA suggested they were being impacted nearly the same as we are here in FL.

You're still paying $20k+, you can't count your trade in as found money.

Leasing gives you an "out" with a floor on your resale value. At the end of three years if you really think keeping the car is the right thing to do buy out the lease at that point. Maybe by then we'll know what if anything Nissan is willing or able to do for people who have lost capacity/range. I still have a few more months to go before my lease is up; if we don't hear anything substantive by then I'm going to turn mine in rather than buy it out... although I might just sign up for another three year lease on a base model if the price is right. Perpetual payments goes against my grain too, but $200/mo to save $150/mo in gas is still a good story, particularly when you consider you have bumper to bumper factory warranty coverage.

Capacity loss concerns aside, you might also think whether you may want to upgrade if they come out with an improved model... which will further crater the resale value of a Leaf you own.

 

[philipscoggins]

The current Leaf is a throwaway car; you want to stick with leasing. Don't get lured into a higher payment for frills on a car you're going to hand back to Nissan in the not too distant future anyway, instead just get the cheapest price you can on a base model. JMO.

The Leaf is a throwaway car :?: If it is, I dont want one... Whats up with that :?: :?:

I'm not sure why everyone is so big on leasing. We are planning to buy ours. And for almost nothing... Assuming a $30,000 purchase price, - $7,500 federal and $2,500 state credits (i.e. $10,000 free money), - $12,000 trade on current Mazda3 = $8,000 total to purchase the car.

Just so you go into this with full disclosure. You don't actually get a check from the government for $7500 when you file your taxes. It only reduces the taxes you owe by $7500. My income wasn't high enough & I already had enough deductions (kids) so that it only helped me get back about $1000 or so. Now, if you lease the car from Nissan they take the $7500 off the price as they can use all of it. You can then turn around and buy your car out of lease right away & own the car. That's what I wish someone had told me before I purchased.

I drive about 25k miles/year, so there's no lease that even comes close to covering my needs.

 

[BrockWI]

Just so you go into this with full disclosure. You don't actually get a check from the government for $7500 when you file your taxes. It only reduces the taxes you owe by $7500. My income wasn't high enough & I already had enough deductions (kids) so that it only helped me get back about $1000 or so. Now, if you lease the car from Nissan they take the $7500 off the price as they can use all of it. You can then turn around and buy your car out of lease right away & own the car. That's what I wish someone had told me before I purchased.

I drive about 25k miles/year, so there's no lease that even comes close to covering my needs.

We are in the same boat with 4 kids and will likely have mileage in the 15k to 20k range annually. But that is why we went with the lease, so they (Nissan) could take the $7,500 and we just pay off the car at the end of the lease. I was like $300 more than if we assumed we got the whole $7,500 back and I know we wouldn't, so leasing was a better option for us in the end.

 

[LTLFTcomposite]

The only downside I know of to leasing then buying out as opposed to buying to begin with is some fees. It's cheap insurance to have the flexibility to put the car back to them at the three year mark for any of a variety of reasons without fear of horrible resale value.

 

[braineo]

Anyone with retirement savings could convert any IRA into a ROTH and generate Federal taxes that can be offset with the EV tax credit.

 

[LTLFTcomposite]

Anyone with retirement savings could convert any IRA into a ROTH and generate Federal taxes that can be offset with the EV tax credit.

Awesome suggestion. Of course it doesn't help with cash flow in the here and now, but at least you'd convert some pre-tax money to post-tax, which in theory pays off big in the long run.

 

[dgpcolorado]

Anyone with retirement savings could convert any IRA into a ROTH and generate Federal taxes that can be offset with the EV tax credit.

I did this. The downside was that it increased my tax bracket substantially, which I could have entirely avoided otherwise by making the IRA to Roth conversion slowly over many years. So that $7500 credit was worth a lot less to me than it seems.

The lease versus buy question is even more complex in my state because the generous state tax credit — fully refundable — is reduced substantially for leased cars. It is a complex multi-variable calculation.

One nice thing about the state tax credit is that if I were to buy a used EV (Tesla, say) from out of state, it qualifies for the credit. [As an aside: I wish that used Tesla prices were in the realm of reason — they seem to be almost the same as new prices less tax credit. Perhaps in three years or so, when current owners have moved on to the latest models, used prices will come down. Or maybe the Model E will actually turn out to be real and "affordable", although I remain skeptical.]

 

[TimLee]

The Leaf is a throwaway car :?: If it is, I dont want one... Whats up with that :?: :?:

I'm not sure why everyone is so big on leasing. We are planning to buy ours. And for almost nothing... Assuming a $30,000 purchase price, - $7,500 federal and $2,500 state credits (i.e. $10,000 free money), - $12,000 trade on current Mazda3 = $8,000 total to purchase the car.

The degree to which it is a "throwaway car" is still yet to be determined by us the early adopters.
It will likely be 2 or 3 years more before we know definitively to what degree it is a "throwaway car".
But the much more rapid battery deterioration than Nissan originally stated should be expected, and then their unwillingness to even sell replacement batteries does point in that direction strongly.

The one thing many people failed to recognize is that the battery capacity degrades with time, no matter how little you use it or how well you treat it. Unless you have the means to keep the battery temperature below 75F to 80F 98+% of the time. And that is pretty impractical except in a few places in the world. Not very practical in Atlanta.
If your commuting needs are fairly short, the LEAF may work for six to eight years without battery degradation impacting you.
In my case, I've only drive 20,000 miles in about 3 years, and the round trip commute to downtown is only 34 miles. So in my case the LEAF will likely be usable for at least six to eight years.

But there is also a chance that battery degradation after the battery gets to 70% or less of original capacity could accelerate. We just don't know yet. It is certainly the case that the different battery chemistry in laptop and cell phones (similar to the Tesla battery chemistry) tend to survive a few years, and then become relatively useless quickly. But laptop and cell phone batteries don't control battery temperature well. Their batteries get real hot, and many stay charged at 100% charge a lot of the time. The Tesla controls temperature some, and like the LEAF they want you to not charge to 100% much.
The LEAF does hardly anything to control battery temperature, just a little air flow past the case when the vehicle is moving, which actually makes the situation worse in hot weather and reduces range in cold weather.

The LEAF battery doesn't appear to be anywhere near as bad as laptop or cell phone batteries, or that "disposable", but the long term real world experience data isn't in yet. Only three years of real world experience.

There is a chance that my six or eight year old LEAF with only 50,000 to 65,000 miles on it may have a near useless range for me and require battery replacement. Who knows what that will cost :?: Currently probably somewhere between $8,000 and $14,000. Some say less in the $4,000 to $5,000 range but I'm very skeptical of that. Most people will not be willing to put that many $ into an eight year old car that is worth less than $4,000 to $5,000. Of course battery cost may come down. Maybe, but not certain :? .

And the technology is changing with more competition on EVs. The improvement of 6kW charging is a significant improvement over the 2011 / 2012. There are rumors of Nissan offering a larger battery capacity at some point. That would be a big improvement for many people, although a costly one.
So many people do consider the LEAF to be a "throwaway car". In 2011 two out of three people were buying instead of leasing. The 2011 lease costs were pretty outrageously high compared to the current lease costs. So at this point around 85% of people are leasing instead of buying.

In Georgia which allows the current $5,000 tax credit (at least till July 1 as far as I know) to be done on leases too, and with the need to get both the $5,000 against your state income tax liability if you buy, along with the $7,500 federal tax credit against the federal tax liability, that takes a fairly high income to apply both if you buy. So many people are leasing. Just need to be sure the dealer is passing through the $7,500 on the lease deal. But you've still got to get the $5,000 when you file your state income tax. If you don't have that much liability, you can file for the remainder in following years.

 

[Stanton]

So the short story is: Nissan took the legs out from under the "throwaway car" theory with the 5 yr/60k mile capacity warranty (at least for most of us). Beyond that, I have never regretted buying my Leaf as I never intended on selling it in 3 or 5 (or 7) years. I'm now enjoying a (recently) paid off car with NO gas and NO maintenance and I'm in line to get a new (free) battery pack next year *better* than the one I've got; only time will tell HOW much better...

 

[LTLFTcomposite]

^ TimLee speaks the truth with far more substance than my snarky remark about the car being "throwaway".

Ask yourself, after reading that, if Nissan is going to offer these killer lease deals why would you even consider buying until more is known about the battery life expectancy, replacement options, and future choices for alternative and improved vehicles?

Consider that someone leasing here in 2014 will, at the end of their lease, have visibility to just how well 6-7 year old Leafs are holding up when they make that final decision to either buy out the car or give it back. That's not a bad bit of information to be armed with in making that decision.

When you combine that with the uncertainty of when and how much of the tax credits you will receive I just don't see the upside to buying... leasing and buying out, maybe, but not buying at the outset.

 

[Reddy]

^^^ Tim has provided an excellent explanation. Even though I purchased in 2011 and still very much enjoy my car, given today's situation (killer lease deals, GA incentives, unknown heat degradation for the newer batteries) and if I lived in GA instead of WA, I would certainly lease. The LEAF is a great car for in town, less than 50 mi running around, and you never need to waste your life at a gas station. Use the Prius for longer out of town trips. That way you can skip the expensive options (although you will miss cruise control, even in town) and have a nearly free car for 2-3 years.

 

[WetEV]

I lived in GA instead of WA, I would certainly lease.

+1

 

[LeftieBiker]

Just out of curiosity: why do you folks think that warranty replacement battery packs for current generation Leafs will be next-gen, as opposed to new current-gen packs...?

 

[braineo]

There is more to it for the decision of buy vs. lease in Georgia. This might be the last year that the tax credit is offered. It almost got killed and we were only saved by literally the bell. So far it is good at least until April 1, 2015.

I'd buy (if a great discount is being offered to make car net cost less than $10,000 not including a trade-in) or lease a 2015 if that included the rumored 135 mile battery.

Bought my 2011 SL for after tax credit cost of $16k with 0 down and my Mitsubishi iMiev SE for $8k including taxes. You can't touch a decent car for those net prices. I decided to keep my old but functional vehicles for longer trips.

My decision was due to having the tax liability and unable to forgo the great deals due to "new / untitled for tax purposes" left over fully loaded demo models. This might happen again with 2014's if the 2015 model has the extended battery range.

Join evClubSouth.org and meet the gang of EV early adopters.

 

[braineo]

Just out of curiosity: why do you folks think that warranty replacement battery packs for current generation Leafs will be next-gen, as opposed to new current-gen packs...?

Because they will no longer produce the old packs. To tweak the chemistry is as simple as changing the saline lithium solution and the material that makes up the anode or cathode. All the old packs have been used for production. They probably are currently producing the new packs and stockpiling them for the new models.

 

[LeftieBiker]

Just out of curiosity: why do you folks think that warranty replacement battery packs for current generation Leafs will be next-gen, as opposed to new current-gen packs...?

Because they will no longer produce the old packs. To tweak the chemistry is as simple as changing the saline lithium solution and the material that makes up the anode or cathode. All the old packs have been used for production. They probably are currently producing the new packs and stockpiling them for the new models.

Unless you know this for a fact, I wouldn't assume it. They could probably run the battery production line one extra day and have the extra replacement packs they need. I've seen nothing so far to indicate that Nissan would be as generous as you believe.

 

[LTLFTcomposite]

They could manufacture only 36 or 48kwh pack modules but limit the capacity in software on older model cars. They could even simulate the hot climate degradation just to really piss us off.