~Double your range: get two Leafs?

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MikeD

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 24, 2010
Messages
704
Assuming most of your driving is near enough to your home as opposed to on long trips, what are the pros/cons of this? At least you are not having to lug around a much bigger battery pack and "half" the total battery pack can be charging while you are driving with the other "half".
 
I have two LEAFs (and a gas car as a backup). I also have two drivers in my household. I noticed that there is some synergy, but not a lot: both LEAFs are usually at their lowest charge around 6-7pm because of all the driving during the day. I think that having 6.6 kW chargers would help (both of my LEAFs have 3.3 kW chargers). What would really help, though, is having an option for a bigger battery. Having one electric car with a bigger range would allow me to get rid of the gas car. For example, if we had a Tesla and a LEAF, we would be able switch all of our driving to EVs.
 
We have only had the leaf for two weekends now and last Saturday we drove in excess of 150 miles running errands. We just plugged it in for the short time we were at home and kept running, no problems. Luckily it was a weekend and at low charging rates. During the week we might run in to an issue charging at peak rates, but even then it would cost about 6 cents a mile to charge vs 10 cents a mile even in our TDI diesel. The cost of the larger 6.6kw evse should pay for itself because we can keep running the leaf when it would otherwise be empty thus forcing us to run an ice as well as the reduced losses compared to charging at level 1 or 120v.

Right now my wife can come home for lunch and put 20 miles back in the leaf to keep running around. In winter our off peak rates are noon to 4p and 9p to 8a. In summer our off peak rates are 7p to 9a.
 
I'm not sure it would make economic sense for a single driver to get two LEAFs just to increase range. However, we have a pool of drivers and our first LEAF proved very popular with everyone. We learned to plan days so that the longest trips would get the LEAF, being the most economical, and quickly realized that a) we were going way over our lease allocation of 15k/year miles and b) we could keep a second LEAF fully occupied with additional trips that were safely within range. So we bought the second one after selling our oldest ICE car. It's worked great for us.
 
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