redLEAF
Well-known member
pkulak said:Well, I made a good go at being a one-car, electric-only household, but we finally got a bit fed up. We take a lot more road trips than we thought and renting is kind of a pain in the ass, especially if you want a larger car. So, now we'll have a 2-year-old Mazda5 for road trips and our Leaf for around town. It's a pretty good hybrid system, actually; it's just split between two cars. If we got rid of the Leaf and used the gasser in town we'd only save about 50 bucks when accounting for all the gas we'd use. So the utility of having two cars between us will be nice.
I think I'm also going to put the Mazda on RelayRides; see how that works out. 5 rental days a month will cover the entire payment, so we'll see how that works out and whether it's worth the trouble of giving your car out to random people.
But to anyone thinking of getting rid of their only car and replacing it with a 70-mile EV... think long and hard! Renting gets to be a real pain, even if it's only once a month.
Back to the OP -- the key here is how many drivers and what their daily commutes, etc. -- we have 3 drivers and 4 cars; if in a two driver family (one partner/spouse that stays or works at home mostly) that might change some things but I would wonder how big a percentage of all LEAF owner's (who aren't single) can get by with just the one 100% EV and rent another car/truck as needed. Out here in the midwest, we also just had one really bad winter where on some days it simply wasn't prudent to take a chance driving the LEAF and leaving it parked outside all day in below zero temps so an ICE was needed. I do like the Volt and LEAF as a combo, but the Volt is just too tight for all the stuff we need to take on trips ... looking forward to the VW CrossBlue Coupe which promises AWD and PHEV (possibly diesel) power or another mid-sized SUV PHEV with about 30 to 40 miles electric range for the daily work commute; may end up being too complex and costly but we'll see.