What’s the Opposite of Cutting the Cord?

…chuck­ing the gas can, I suppose.

When we bought a gas/electric hybrid, it was the per­fect vehi­cle for my needs at the time. A 4x4 for vis­it­ing con­struc­tion sites, enough room to car­ry us and the dogs, and good fuel econ­o­my. How­ev­er, in near­ly sev­en years since then, my sit­u­a­tion has changed con­sid­er­ably. I now telecom­mute to work from home, I no longer go to job sites, and Angela has a swanky mini­van for our long fam­i­ly trips with kids and dogs.

So, we sold the hybrid Escape and got a ful­ly elec­tric vehi­cle: a Nis­san LEAF.

Inside and Out

As Angela put it, this is the per­fect nerd car. 1The per­for­mance of the car is sur­pris­ing­ly good, but I’m not real­ly a fast dri­ver, any­way. The fun stuff is all the gad­getry in and out of the car. The nav­i­ga­tion and user inter­face are about the best I’ve ever used in a car. The touch screen is real­ly nice.

Also, Nis­san has a mobile app for the iPhone2 (and Android?) that can be used to check up on the charg­ing as well as start the cli­mate con­trol in the car. So between installing Nest units in our house and this car, I can con­trol my A/C from anywhere!

I do have to con­fess a cer­tain amount of pride that this car was built just down I‑840, in Smyr­na, TN. That cut­ting edge elec­tric vehi­cles and their bat­ter­ies are built here and that Nis­san has its cor­po­rate head­quar­ters for North Amer­i­ca here in Franklin cer­tain­ly makes me feel like I’m buy­ing Amer­i­can, regard­less of the Japan­ese her­itage of the com­pa­ny (and most of the parts in the engine). A num­ber of my neigh­bors and friends work at Nis­san, many of whom dri­ve LEAFs. I even met one of the fac­to­ry guys —who also dri­ves a LEAF!— on the show­room floor. And my par­tic­u­lar car had real­ly just arrived from the plant, with all the ship­ping pro­tec­tion still in place and six miles on the odometer.

Range and Power

In the past week, we’ve man­aged to take a 70 mile round trip dri­ve up to Opry Mills and anoth­er 50 mile round trip to down­town Nashville, both with no issues of range. I’ve also dri­ven around town every­day; tak­ing kids to school, going to the gym, trips to the movies, and of course the gro­cery store. I can say this car is about the per­fect city car and is works well enough on the inter­state or high­way (though at above 70 mph, you can pret­ty much watch the bat­tery lev­el drain down like there was a hole in the thing). Franklin prob­a­bly has the high­est num­ber of elec­tric charg­ing sta­tions per capi­ta in the coun­try, so we live in a good place to have an ev.

So far, I’ve been just using the 110v trick­le (Lev­el 1) charg­er that is includ­ed with the vehi­cle trim we got. It works fine, as it gets eas­i­ly topped-off overnight. In fact, it’s just plugged into my work­bench’s pow­er strip, between the drill press and miter saw. How­ev­er, if I had an actu­al dai­ly com­mute, I’d def­i­nite­ly spring for a 220v (Lev­el 2) charg­er in our garage. I could see a dri­ve like that cou­pled with a evening dri­ve around town leav­ing you with less-than-enough to make it home the fol­low­ing day.

I’ll have to com­pare month­ly ener­gy usage from here on with pre­vi­ous years to get a sense for what the actu­al cost is for us, but I’m con­fi­dent it’ll be under 1/3 of what we paid pre­vi­ous­ly in gas (or what we’d pay for sim­i­lar trips around town in our van).

Summary

I’ll con­tin­ue to post updates as we use the car3. I’m sure I’ll have some sto­ry about the first time I run out of pow­er some­where out on the road.

As much as I’d like to think we’re on the cut­ting edge here, you can­not dri­ve any­where around Franklin, TN (the home of Nis­san North Amer­i­ca) with­out pass­ing a half-dozen LEAF’s. There aren’t too many oth­er kinds of elec­tric cars here, but they’ve also been on the road (else­where) for a cou­ple of years now. The charg­ing infra­struc­ture is quick­ly grow­ing around us. So, this move felt a lot less like blaz­ing a trail than jump­ing on a trend that is right for us.

But, as for now, the most I can say is this car seems like a great car. Of course, that’s large­ly in part because I’m almost exact­ly the demo­graph­ic for this car.

1. Arguably, that would be a Tes­la, but I can’t jus­ti­fy that kind of car. [↩]
2. Though, the app is almost laugh­ably bad. I’ve seen fart apps with bet­ter UI and it’s not updat­ed for the iPhone 5. I’m sure this is com­plain­ing about too much oil on my caviar, but we’re not talk­ing about some small out­fit here… it’s a major auto­mo­tive com­pa­ny! [↩]
3. Says the guy who posts less than every oth­er month these days. [↩]