Reason number 432 why owning/leasing a Leaf is a good thing

Today we took our MY2012 Mit Lancer GT into the dealer for the 30,000 mile service. The car ran fine, so no additional problems to fix. Cost to pick it up was almost $500.

Maintenance cost of the Leaf:
* Tire Rotation every 7,500 miles: free at Discount Tires
* Annual Battery Test: free at dealer
* Air filter change: not needed as we do not drive in dusty environment

We LOVE our Leaf!

My cost of fuel and maintenance for the 16000 miles I have put on my Leaf has been right at $225.

I've logged 12,500 miles on my 2013, and total cost including (free) annual battery check and all electricity is $390... $0.0312 per mile for fuel and maintenance - not bad! Since I'm on a two year lease, I believe I'll be able to turn the Leaf in and have spent ZERO on maintenance... Lease was $220 per month, no sales tax in WA state, and no down payment. Pretty sweet!

Graffi said:

Today we took our MY2012 Mit Lancer GT into the dealer for the 30,000 mile service. The car ran fine, so no additional problems to fix. Cost to pick it up was almost $500.

Maintenance cost of the Leaf:
* Tire Rotation every 7,500 miles: free at Discount Tires
* Annual Battery Test: free at dealer
* Air filter change: not needed as we do not drive in dusty environment

We LOVE our Leaf!

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Do you mean the Cabin Air filter?

chuhouse2003 said:

Graffi said:

Today we took our MY2012 Mit Lancer GT into the dealer for the 30,000 mile service. The car ran fine, so no additional problems to fix. Cost to pick it up was almost $500.

Maintenance cost of the Leaf:
* Tire Rotation every 7,500 miles: free at Discount Tires
* Annual Battery Test: free at dealer
* Air filter change: not needed as we do not drive in dusty environment

We LOVE our Leaf!

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Do you mean the Cabin Air filter?

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Yes, cabin air filter. Is there another air filter I do not know about?

Oh, I have an appointment to do our first annual on Graffi in 8 more days. They want to do a brake flush, almost $100. Is this required for maintaining the Lease warranty? If not, I would like to tell them NO. On all my other cars I never touched the brake system until I had to change the brake pads. Never annually.

Say NO. Even on ICE cars you would do that no more frequently than 50K miles, on an EV it should much more longer than that, because you rarely use your brakes compared to an ICE car.

So now you understand why the dealers hate EVs and want to kill it.

Graffi said:

Oh, I have an appointment to do our first annual on Graffi in 8 more days. They want to do a brake flush, almost $100. Is this required for maintaining the Lease warranty? If not, I would like to tell them NO.

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mkjayakumar said:

Say NO.

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Agreed.

Graffi said:

On all my other cars I never touched the brake system until I had to change the brake pads. Never annually.

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I would not wait until you need to replace the brake pads, since then you may NEVER flush the brake fluid. I just replaced two brake calipers on my truck with under 70,000 miles because it had a lot of YEARS on it. As such, I wouldn't recommend going much beyond about 50K miles or four years on brake fluid.

Graffi said:

Oh, I have an appointment to do our first annual on Graffi in 8 more days. They want to do a brake flush, almost $100. Is this required for maintaining the Lease warranty? If not, I would like to tell them NO. On all my other cars I never touched the brake system until I had to change the brake pads. Never annually.

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For Normal service it is required every other year.
Required annually for Severe service.

Technically, is that more often than what is technically required based on water absorption and loss of corrosion inhibitor functionality, yes.
With proper testing four to five years might be OK.
But Nissan is very conservative with their change interval on all their vehicles.

Will they catch you and attempt to penalize you at end of lease if you don't do it?
Probably not, but there is some risk.
Some brake components are very expensive, > $1,200.
$100 brake flush every two years isn't that expensive.

Thanks for the input. Since we have a 45k mile 3-year lease, we can hold off until the lease is over and trade it in for a 2016, or 17 since the 15's are already out. We are just just under 15k miles at the one year mark.

So we are back to the "FREE" annual service, with only the battery test and inspection.

My Leaf is actually going to cost me a fair amount of money, but only because I'll probably be 2-3 thousand mikes over the 24,000 included in the lease. However, at $0.15 a mile, it's the same price as driving a gas car that gets 28 mpg, so I really have no reason not to drive it and go over.