Taken the Leafie plunge

GreyDad

Hi All,

Well, at long last I finally put a deposit down on a Nissan leaf last weekend, meant to come on here and spread the joy but have been incredibly busy all week and just catching up again now.

It's a Sonic Blue 2015 ex-demo Acenta with less than 700 miles on the clock and with a 6.6kW charger. It has the chrome pack and protection pack fitted and I'm having rear parking sensors installed by the dealer. I've looked online at about 30-40 Leafs all over the UK and chased after 4 or 5 of them but in the end found the one we wanted less than an hour away in South Wales.

It's supposed to be for the missus and she's super-excited about it but I think we may be fighting over it at weekends...

Plan to pick it up in early-mid Aug when they've sorted it out for the extras. Can't wait

I wanted to thank everyone on here as this was the first EV forum I joined and it has been incredibly helpful, with comments and experiences from Mad_Lad, cros13, pwurple, padraig mor, reboot, pepoahi, Benny_Cake, Dexter1979 and many others plus the fascinating journey of DrPhilG's Leaf purchase Thank you!

Now looking forward to that EV trip across to Ireland at some point!

Cheers

Neil

pwurple

Nice! That's the colour I wanted, but it wasn't available without a 2 month wait.

You're going to love it. Well wear.

NIMAN

Best of luck to you both with it.

Keep us up to date with your experience of it, might persuade some others like myself to take the plunge.

Padraig Mor

Best of luck with Neil!

peposhi

GreyDad wrote: »

Hi All,

Well, at long last I finally put a deposit down on a Nissan leaf last weekend, meant to come on here and spread the joy but have been incredibly busy all week and just catching up again now.

It's a Sonic Blue 2015 ex-demo Acenta with less than 700 miles on the clock and with a 6.6kW charger. It has the chrome pack and protection pack fitted and I'm having rear parking sensors installed by the dealer. I've looked online at about 30-40 Leafs all over the UK and chased after 4 or 5 of them but in the end found the one we wanted less than an hour away in South Wales.

It's supposed to be for the missus and she's super-excited about it but I think we may be fighting over it at weekends...

Plan to pick it up in early-mid Aug when they've sorted it out for the extras. Can't wait

I wanted to thank everyone on here as this was the first EV forum I joined and it has been incredibly helpful, with comments and experiences from Mad_Lad, cros13, pwurple, padraig mor, reboot, pepoahi, Benny_Cake, Dexter1979 and many others plus the fascinating journey of DrPhilG's Leaf purchase Thank you!

Now looking forward to that EV trip across to Ireland at some point!

Cheers

Neil

It's a whole new world ahead of you! Delighted for you!
Best of luck and just on the sharing thing... My wife is now fighting with me who's taking the Leaf and who is taking the ICE... LOL

Keep us updated how you get on and enjoy it!

Benny_Cake

Congratulations Neil! You've certainly done your homework anyway!

Good man Neil, another leaf on the road......almost ! :-)

GreyDad

Thanks all - the blue looks cool, it's what she wanted and I took a long time to find one.

I'll post some photo's when I get chance - I have a few but the car was covered with Nissan/EV/IKEA/Ecotricity stickers so I'll wait til they clean them off. I was warned to be careful about marking on the paint from these so I've discussed with the dealer who says that's usually down to incorrect cleaning off of the adhesive, they are well aware of it and take great care to do it properly. I will check it anyway when we go to collect

Can't wait, so excited, so is my wife. I was getting texts from her at work the last couple of weeks "Have you spoken to them today?" "Have you paid the deposit yet?" lol

GreyDad

GreyDad wrote: »

Can't wait, so excited, so is my wife. I was getting texts from her at work the last couple of weeks "Have you spoken to them today?" "Have you paid the deposit yet?" lol

My partner was very far from being excited she just hasn't got the slightest bit of interest. "it's just a car so what ?" Has driven it about twice in about 9,000 kms for about 45 Kms max. So you're lucky your Missus is excited about it.

GreyDad

Why wouldn't you be excited about having a Leaf to drive? They're wonderful.

It's the biggest car my missus has had (apart from when she drove my Octavia Scout when I was using the van but she didn't enjoy it much) and it's also very quick, which she likes a lot. She had a Fabia VRS which was her favourite car ever because she used to just blow away anyone that annoyed her and as I've mentioned before we sold that to get the van 5 years ago and she has been sulking ever since

The Leaf is larger and pretty luxurious compared to the VRS and although not quite as quick is pretty close and has more useable acceleration. She loves it and I'm sure will drive more than she does at the moment once she has it.

GreyDad

GreyDad wrote: »

Why wouldn't you be excited about having a Leaf to drive? They're wonderful.

It's the biggest car my missus has had (apart from when she drove my Octavia Scout when I was using the van but she didn't enjoy it much) and it's also very quick, which she likes a lot. She had a Fabia VRS which was her favourite car ever because she used to just blow away anyone that annoyed her and as I've mentioned before we sold that to get the van 5 years ago and she has been sulking ever since

The Leaf is larger and pretty luxurious compared to the VRS and although not quite as quick is pretty close and has more useable acceleration. She loves it and I'm sure will drive more than she does at the moment once she has it.

She has no interest in cars what so ever, maybe, just maybe if it were the Xtrail she might be interested, she likes the SUV type cars.

Nissan need to start making more electrics like the Quasqai and Xtrail , put a 60 -80 KWH battery in there and it would be a really nice form of transport.

GreyDad

Women, eh?

I'm lucky, my missus even likes sailing... !

Yes, agree, an electric Qashqai would be good. My Scout was in for a service yesterday (grrr) and while there I looked at the Yeti again which is a fantastic car and thought it would be an excellent platform for an electric (or at least PHEV) vehicle.

DrPhilG

Congrats.

Glad my thread was a help to you.

I'm 6 weeks and 2k miles in and love it. I'm contemplating upgrading to the new model in 4 or 5 years but I might actually keep this car and go back to being a 2 car house then.

My wife loves it. Surround parking cameras are her friend.

GreyDad

GreyDad wrote: »

Women, eh?

I'm lucky, my missus even likes sailing... !

Yes, agree, an electric Qashqai would be good. My Scout was in for a service yesterday (grrr) and while there I looked at the Yeti again which is a fantastic car and thought it would be an excellent platform for an electric (or at least PHEV) vehicle.

I don't like plug ins because they've got an engine and too small a battery so a lot of people end up buying the plug-in for the few times a year they might need a lot more range only to want more ev range and most of the time wish they bought the Ev instead because they like driving on battery power a lot more and saving so much on petrol/diesel and plug-ins are usually more expensive, look at the prius price and the tiny ev range, ridiculous, Toyota have really lost the plot spending so much money on Fuel cells instead.

Unfortunately Nissan have absolutely no plans to make nay other battery Ev model than anyone knows about and if they do it will be 2020+ . The Leaf doesn't appeal to everyone because of it's shape, size etc so Nissan really need to make more electric models.

GreyDad

DrPhilG wrote: »

Congrats.

Glad my thread was a help to you.

I'm 6 weeks and 2k miles in and love it. I'm contemplating upgrading to the new model in 4 or 5 years but I might actually keep this car and go back to being a 2 car house then.

My wife loves it. Surround parking cameras are her friend.

Glad it's going well

Our plan is for this Leaf to be for my wife for a couple of years, while I get something longer range to replace the Scout, then when the exciting stuff comes out in 2017/18 I'll upgrade, move mine on to my wife and then my eldest son will get this Leaf as his first car. I can actually see it being in the family for very many years.

galwaytt

Deleted User wrote: »

The Leaf doesn't appeal to everyone because of it's shape, size etc so Nissan really need to make more electric models.

...which begs the question: why did they lumber a technically good, but alternative car, with 'challenging' styling as well: they gave themselves 2 hurdles for people to deal with. Something less 'challenging' but as technically way out there as possible would simply sell easier. People still like their cars to look...........nice.

galwaytt

galwaytt wrote: »

...which begs the question: why did they lumber a technically good, but alternative car, with 'challenging' styling as well: they gave themselves 2 hurdles for people to deal with. Something less 'challenging' but as technically way out there as possible would simply sell easier. People still like their cars to look...........nice.

The leaf looks the way it does I presume due to aerodynamics, those big lights divert wind over the door mirrors and it works brilliantly. I presume Leaf II will look better, perhaps more Pulsar style I just hope it's a bit bigger. I hope they offer more electric models soon but it's unlikely and they've hinted strongly that they will make plug ins and not another EV model which really is a shame.

cros13

Deleted User wrote: »

The leaf looks the way it does I presume due to aerodynamics, those big lights divert wind over the door mirrors and it works brilliantly. I presume Leaf II will look better, perhaps more Pulsar style I just hope it's a bit bigger. I hope they offer more electric models soon but it's unlikely and they've hinted strongly that they will make plug ins and not another EV model which really is a shame.

Yup... very low drag coefficient for it's body type. At 100km/h you spend more energy pushing air around the car than you spend actually moving the car itself, so drag is really important for the energy budget.