We are still loving driving our LEAF! We used BeeBee even more than the Highlander this year, since we didn’t travel long distances as much due to the pandemic. However, the total miles driven (6084) was about the same as last year. We used 1.5 megawatts of electricity to power her. If we didn’t have solar panels, it would’ve only cost us $123! That is a savings of around $713 over my old Subaru! (So, it pays to have an EV whether you have solar or not.) But, because we have solar panels, our savings is actually $836! Plus we saved 5800 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere (290 gallons X 20 lbs/gallon of gas).
We also saved money on repairs and maintenance. I have driven 100,000+ ICE vehicles for most of my life and they have high R&M bills, about $900 per year on average. This year the LEAF had her 30,000 mile check up, which is a big one, but it only cost $410. So the LEAF cost $490 less to maintain than my old vehicles. This brings the total savings of driving the LEAF for a year to $1,323! (NOTE: This will decrease as the car ages and the R&M bills get higher.) In future years, I will keep a running total of savings so you can see how owning an EV plays out over time. Most EV’s cost about 1/3 of an ICE to maintain due to not having engines and transmissions, and saving the brakes with regenerative braking.
We did lose one bar on the battery indicator this year, meaning that the battery pack is beginning to degrade. This is a normal occurrence and actually I’m surprised we haven’t lost more than one bar given that the car is now 4 years old. We have not noticed any change in our range, so that’s the most important thing. Nissan says to expect 10 years of battery life or 100,000 miles. Our LEAF has only about 34,000, so we should be good to go for long time!
The best part for us has been the pure joy of driving this car and knowing we are powering it with Nevada sunshine and emitting zero carbon and no pollution. We use it most of the time, saving the Highlander for when we need two cars or will be traveling out of the LEAF’s 100-mile range, which wasn’t much this year as you’ll see below.