Evoforce said:
You can now buy an SR new for around $35,000-$3,750 with a 20+ year battery. A couple more years will bring even more choices of brands. Heck, I have seen some older Model S 85 selling in the high 20's. My son owns a Bolt for a year now, both him and his girl are big, seats are no problem for them. We don't know what region of the country you live in and that does make a difference. We are now understanding it appears you may have already made up your mind and are just venting about the cost of Leaf replacement batteries. I know it angered me when my Nissan service manager told me not to buy the Leaf because it was being built as a short lived disposable vehicle. I like to own my vehicles a long time also. I would guess that I currently own more vehicles than most on this forum although my oldest car is only a "65". I'm sure some own older... Good luck!
FYI: I'm in the Seattle area.
An SR doesn't do it. We're cheap, but we also enjoy our luxuries, and if we're buying a brand new car, it's not going to be baseline, or even close to.
And I'd love to see these Model S 85s you're talking about. We did a lot of shopping, and the only 85s we saw in that price range had major deficiencies. An 85 worth buying, even an old, high mileage one, was generally at least $45K, and often higher than that. That's why we were willing to pay $37K for a 60. If I'd been able to find an 85 for sale at that price (never mind $10K lower), I certainly would've bought that instead.
As for the Bolt, I've been in one. I don't really care how big someone else is, or whether the seats are a problem for them or not. I already know whether the seats work for me.
(For the record: "big" is a very imprecise way of describing someone's size. A tall person like me has bone structure that's scaled up all around, including significantly wider hips. A shorter, overweight person may have the same width dimensionally, but that width is made of structure that's a lot more compressible. And indeed, the issue with the Bolt is that I can feel my hip bones squeezed by the side supports of the driver's seat. If I had more built-in padding, maybe it'd be different.)
I haven't made up my mind about anything yet, but I certainly haven't seen that it's a foregone conclusion that there's
zero justification for
anyone paying the exorbitant cost of a LEAF battery replacement. Even at that price, you are still getting a car that is at least as useful as the car was when brand new, so if that's not a car that's good enough, one probably shouldn't have bought the LEAF in the first place. I know for sure, in our specific case, that is definitely not true. The LEAF has been a fantastically useful car for us, in spite of the current dilemma.