mkjayakumar said:
Let me rephrase it:
Real world usable range is 10 miles less than that the EPA's estimates which would be 63 miles. Anything more than 63 miles I better be close to my charging station.
More like "real world *reliable* range is 73 miles"
with caveats.
If you're thinking of buying the car and you want to know if you're going to make your 60 mile commute to work every day, then there's a high likelihood that you will, unless any of the following apply:
1. You live in a place where it gets *really* cold in winter. On days where it gets down to -20 C or colder, you can expect about 55% of that 73 miles. These are the worst conditions for the Leaf to drive under, but if you never need to drive more than about 35 miles on your way to work, then yahtzee! It's not like the car will freeze solid and be completely unusable at normal human temperatures. I would expect that you'd want some backup for the days where it reaches -40 or lower though. And always keep it plugged in at night in winter.
2. You feel the need to drive over 70 mph, likely with the air conditioning on. I understand that this is necessary in some places. You can expect about a 25% hit
if most or all of the trip is like this, so about 54 miles. If on the other hand, you're only actually on the freeway for 15 miles, then you can practically throw this data away. The difference between "actual" and "projected" would be so small as to not even bother. There's some freeway speeds in the EPA test in the first place.
3. You intend to own the car more than about 8 years or 100k miles. Past that, Nissan *expects* you'd see about a 20% degradation in your battery, on top of any poor conditions you'd see above. Whether or not that comes to fruition will depend on a lot of different things, but real world testing shows that high battery degradation only really comes with hot temperatures combined with DC quick charging while the pack is still hot.
Outside these conditions on the other hand, that EPA range is if anything, overly cautious. It's easy to exceed 73 miles on days that you don't need heat or air conditioning, often by a large margin. But you can certainly *count* on that range, most of the time. On top of all that, some of us are lucky enough to live in places where you might only see truly hot or cold conditions once or twice in your lifetime. Even the area around New York state isn't going to see temperatures over 45 C very often, unlike Arizona, which is where all the reports of any battery degradation have come from so far, and they pretty much never see anything colder than -20.
In other words, to call out the EPA range estimates as "overoptimistic" is really reaching. Nissan was originally trying for 100 miles, and only got that in the Japanese test cycle. So the EPA is hardly coddling them.