New to Nissan Leaf

Hello all. I have been considering leasing the Leaf through motability which is currently £600 deposit for 3 year lease and extre £200 for the type 2 to type 1 cable. My wife and I live the Northeast of England which appears to have a lot of charge points, mainly charge your car 7kw. There is also a rapid DC charger ( ecotricty) just down the road. The car will only have the standard 3kw charger. So appreciate that this will be slower than the 7kw suggests. We currently travel an average of 100 miles per week, most of which is mostly Urban. As I have a bad back I am limited to how far I can travel then I need a stop. Most of our journeys are quite short but a lot of the places we go to have a charger of some discription and are usually empty. I also have a home charger and 4kw solar panels and in the summer during the afternoon I could charge the car for free if needed.I have been reading that quite a few people have problems with the carwings and the onboard route planner is not so good, hopefully one of you guys can point me in the right direction so I can use my phone for planning. I also know that some of the charge points on zap map are currently ok but in reality are not working. I really could do with a good route planner ( one which shows the distance between charge points) for the odd longer trip I sometimes do.That is if there is such a thing. Any comments would be gladly appreciated. Best Regards Dave

Welcome! It sounds like the Leaf is a perfect fit for you.

For finding charge locations, I like Plugshare -- both the Plugshare app and plugshare.com. At least here in the US it seems to give a good aggregate of all the charging available regardless of which "network" they belong to. Those networks may have their own apps which can give more detailed information, so I often start with Plugshare and then cross-reference when I find a particular station I'm interested in.

For route planning I find Google Maps to be the simplest approach. There is a way to send a route from Google Maps to the car but I found that to be more of a pain than it was worth. So for a long trip I approach it this way:

-consult Plugshare for available charing stations
-consult charge network apps (Chargepoint, Blink, etc) if available, for more details on stations I choose.
- Use the charge station availability to guide my route selection on Google Maps and determine appropriate distances, keeping alternate charging spots in mind.

Once driving I only bother to set a Nav destination to the very next charging station, instead of an entire route. Programming the next destination is straightforward without any of the way-point shenanigans. I once tried using the same waypoint twice on a round-trip and the Nav had a mental breakdown. :roll:

Once at a charge station I'll double-check on the next station, and program it into the nav and I'm good to go. Repeat as necessary.

Dave, check out http://www.leaftalk.co.uk" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; for info local to you. If you're not going far, you won't need trip planning very much.

Thanks Guys for your replies and much appreciated. I have been looking at the other forum for most of my knowledge so far, however I am having great difficulty registering so have been unable to ask any questions unlike on this forum any ideas where I might be going wrong? Best regards Dave

DaveBaxt said:

Thanks Guys for your replies and much appreciated. I have been looking at the other forum for most of my knowledge so far, however I am having great difficulty registering so have been unable to ask any questions unlike on this forum any ideas where I might be going wrong? Best regards Dave

Click to expand...

Hi Dave,

Please PM me your registration details and I will look into it for you.

Regards,
LeafTalk UK Admin