We traded in our sweet 2016 Nissan LEAF for Scott’s new Nissan Ariya in June after over four years of service. BeeBee, as we called her, was such a cute car and the perfect introduction to driving EV’s. It’s always bittersweet and nostalgic to look back on the life of an old car that’s moved on.

When we bought her used in 2019, we had just installed solar panels and realized how much excess electricity we were producing. We decided it was time to take the plunge and buy an EV. We’d just bought a Toyota Highlander Hybrid for Scott to replace his old 4 Runner, so we didn’t want to spend a lot of money. As luck would have it, 2016-17 LEAF’s coming off leases were incredibly cheap at the time. We saved $6,500 buying her over what it would have cost to buy a 2016 Nissan Juke in 2019 (the comparable gas car to the LEAF). Nissan had released the next generation battery with over 150 miles range and no one wanted the old technology anymore. She only had 23,000 miles on her and was in great condition with all 10 bars of her battery life remaining. In the beginning, she could go over 100 miles on a charge.

We fell in love with her zippy speed and cozy interior. We especially loved the heated seats and steering wheel in the winter. She was mostly my car, though we often shared her to save on gas in the Highlander. She was a very reliable car and an easy keeper. We saved a lot of money on repairs and maintenance over my old Subaru Forester, not to mention all the gas savings (see below).

This year her battery lost another bar, down to 7 out of 10 and her range was closer to 80 miles (60 realistically). Scott was needing a car that could go out of the valley if necessary, so it was time to move BeeBee along to a new home. Nissan gave us a good trade-in price for her and one of the employees there ended up buying her. We hope she’ll introduce a new family to the joys of driving EV’s.

Thank you BeeBee for 4 years of fun zipping around town in you, and for helping us get over the EV hump! We’ll miss you!

For the first half of 2023, we drove 1944 miles in the LEAF and saved $318 in gas over what the Juke would have used.

Over the course of her 4+ years with us, BeeBee saved us over $10,000! That’s pretty awesome when you think about it. $6,400 of that savings was from not paying for gas and in the savings of repairs and maintenance over what it would have cost for the comparable gas car. We also saved a lot of money on buying the LEAF ($6,500 over the Juke in 2019), but we gave some of it back on the trade-in ($2,500 less than the Juke in 2023). Still our total savings purchasing the LEAF was $4,000 over the Juke. We also saved about 18,000 tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere by driving the LEAF instead of the Juke.

If you’re thinking about trying an EV, going with an older model that still has life in it is a smart move. As technology moves on, they sell at discounts and then they save you a bunch of money too, not to mention the carbon you don’t put in the atmosphere.