Gen II light weight wheels and tires

Toby said:

Did Nissan go cheap on traction control?

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In my experience, you have to turn off the traction control to get the EV benefits. I've got some old dash cam videos of me driving my Leaf uphill through 1 foot deep snow quite successful as I passed trucks stranded on the side of the hill. The Leaf is no baja, but when it comes to torque, it reighs over ICE any day. I was running 29 psi tires to help during that time.

In my experience, you have to turn off the traction control to get the EV benefits.

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Agreed. We have a permanent label taped onto the dashboard to remind us how to quickly turn traction control off because when the car starts to lose momentum in snow or ice.you need to quickly get both wheels spinning again and full power as needed. I wish it could be turned off and left off but have not been able to figure that out yet- turn the car off and next time you turn it on the Traction control is back on.

dmacarthur said:

In my experience, you have to turn off the traction control to get the EV benefits.

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Agreed. We have a permanent label taped onto the dashboard to remind us how to quickly turn traction control off because when the car starts to lose momentum in snow or ice.you need to quickly get both wheels spinning again and full power as needed. I wish it could be turned off and left off but have not been able to figure that out yet- turn the car off and next time you turn it on the Traction control is back on.

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Unfortunately, the Gen 2 has no easy access button to turn it on and off like the Gen 1 did (I miss that in my 2013). It also resets back to "on" every time you turn off the Leaf, so I always have to remember to turn off traction control when I'm driving through the winter wonderland. I've done it enough times to know exactly where to go on the dash menu to find it, but the convenience factor is certainly missing.

Some time back, I was doing some experiments with traction control on and off in the rain and found that when traction control is off, anti-lock braking still works, but the threshold is pushed way higher for it to activate, allowing you to "soft" lock the tires sometimes if you feather it just right. :lol:

Thank you for the comments. I will look into the Nokian tires for my 16" rims.


The stock tires still have plenty of wear left, so also feel like it would be a shame to toss them, but I do understand the cost or effort of swapping them out.

Some time back, I was doing some experiments with traction control on and off in the rain and found that when traction control is off, anti-lock braking still works, but the threshold is pushed way higher for it to activate, allowing you to "soft" lock the tires sometimes if you feather it just right. :lol:

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That is handy to know also- people who live in snow country for long enough know how to brake and slow down without having to be over-ridden by HAL the computer chip..... But I acknowledge that "long enough" is subjective and anti-lock probably saves some lives.

LeftieBiker said:

Leafs do quite well with dedicated snow & ice tires.

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We had the best Michelin Ice tires on our 2018 Leaf and were were definitely under impressed when driving in winter conditions. We couldn't even get up our neighbour's driveway without sliding out.

I use Michelin X-ice tires and am quite happy with them. Of course, I'm not climbing a steep driveway with them. What tire pressure are you using?

I will look at those too. We are in flat Chicagoland, so a hill here is like 10 feet of elevation over a quarter mile.

I generally keep the cars around 40psi year round.


If I forgo tpms sensors in the tires, will car display a warning or just have blanks for the values?

Anyone use Nokian Encompass tires?

How about the Michelin cross climate?

LeftieBiker said:

I use Michelin X-ice tires and am quite happy with them. Of course, I'm not climbing a steep driveway with them. What tire pressure are you using?

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40 psi. I measure/adjust pressure in the morning in our garage. In the cold weather pressure will drop a couple of psi after leaving the garage.

By trial and error we did learn to not use Eco Mode when conditions are slippery.

Toby said:

LeftieBiker said:

I use Michelin X-ice tires and am quite happy with them. Of course, I'm not climbing a steep driveway with them. What tire pressure are you using?

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40 psi. I measure/adjust pressure in the morning in our garage. In the cold weather pressure will drop a couple of psi after leaving the garage.

By trial and error we did learn to not use Eco Mode when conditions are slippery.

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Depending on your range requirements, once you lower the PSI down to around 29 PSI (making them look kind of flat), even the worst summer tires all of sudden turn into tank tracks due to the weight. :lol: But of course, the range is absolutely terrible and driving on actual road just makes the tires into a parachute. :mrgreen:

I also run about 40psi. I do, however, use Eco mode pretty much exclusively. I don't understand why you avoid it, unless you find yourself flooring the accelerator pedal in Eco.

If I forgo tpms sensors in the tires, will car display a warning or just have blanks for the values?

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We do not have tire pressure sensors on the winter tires, there is s slightly annoying little red light on the dash during winter months but not several hundred dollars annoying.......

LeftieBiker said:

I do, however, use Eco mode pretty much exclusively. I don't understand why you avoid it, unless you find yourself flooring the accelerator pedal in Eco.

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We use Eco mode on dry pavement. When going uphill on a snowy or icy road while in Eco mode the car would stop and groan but essentially stall. Using normal mode eliminated that. It seems strange that turning traction control off would be proposed as a solution; it should be the other way around. Regardless, without a handy push button that's a moot solution.

I'm curious to see how well our 2023 SV handles winter roads.

The traction control thing has to do with deep, deep snow. Assuming the tires have aggressive enough cleats, the wheel spin helps them to 'dig down' through the snow to the pavement or dirt. It probably doesn't work well with snow & ice tires that rely on the softness of the rubber to get grip. We used to have some Nasty Winters here in Upstate NY, and I also spent a few Winters in Ithaca, in Western NY. It wasn't unusual there to see 20+ foot snow banks along the roads. Pretty to look at, but I don't miss those, or the 4' drifts here.

I have decided to go with the crossclimate2 after a bunch of research. The car is going to go out to my daughter in Kansas, so it should handle.the light snow we have there well and still be a reasonable summer tire.

The crossclimate2s went on the SV+ for now on Friday. I am hoping moving from 17" rims to 16" would offset the increased rolling resistance. I need to put a couple 100 miles on the tires before commenting on relative efficiency...but the early few miles were...thirsty. Tires are quiet though, which I appreciate. They also make the Leaf look more rugged.

DougWantsALeaf said:

The crossclimate2s went on the SV+ for now on Friday.

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What has your experience been with those the last couple months? I'm planning on getting a set soon.

I have a 2020 SV+ and was thinking about replacing the 17x6.5 original wheels with 17x8. If I can find 45 offset wheels, should those drive and steer fine? The sites that sell wheels say so. But they also have 850 reasons to lie to me, so I wanted to ask here. Thanks.

We are about to do our first 600 mile day with them, so will report back soon. Overall efficiency is lower though, but not too horrible so far...At least when I drive.

Around town the grip this winter has been amazing versus the ecopias. We have the cc2s on the stock 16" rims on my S+ now and the ev01s with the ecopias on the SV+.

The SV Plus efficiency now is amazing. With those nice seat warmers, even at 30F, I am often above 5 miles/kWh even with some modest freeway.

I posted the comparison efficiency testing on another thread.

Ok, mission complete with driving the S+ with stock 16" rims and CrossClimate2 from Chicago to Kansas (570ish miles)

I won't lie, very painful. Average efficiency was between 3 and 3.3 on all of the legs, and that was Wil some reduced speeds at some points (60-65 vs 70). This meant 130+ kWhs of charging vs. The normal 95ish. I did stop more times to do more charging in the bottom of the pack (though every stop has a 10 min overhead to get on and off the freeway), but overall close to 2 hours of additional travel time over the runs with the ecopias and ev01s. Temps were lower than other runs, which must be factored into the math.

Weather was 24F for the first 5 hours, then slowly increased toward 40 as we got closer to Kansas. My late fall runs prior has highs in the 50s, so this was notably colder.

The only interesting positive was that I hit equilibrium with my charge heating and cooling in the last couple legs. Drive cooled as much as I heated during charging.