NASHVILLE TENNESSEE - LEAF

[jwallace3]

So hopefully by tomorrow night, I'll be driving my new Nissan LEAF home from Newton Nissan of Gallatin. Justin gave me the call today (I missed the call while walking my dog) and left a message saying that the car has arrived and that I could schedule to pick it up tomorrow night.

:mrgreen: is how I look right now (probably). This is all I'm going to be thinking about at work tomorrow, haha!

:lol: Good for you ! I ordered since OCT 2010 and am still waiting. Hopefully it will come soon. Estimate delivery date Wk of JUL 25. Now passed

Wow, that stinks. Is your VIN really 0816? Do you suspect it was a pollen car that is being repainted?

 

[TNleaf]

So hopefully by tomorrow night, I'll be driving my new Nissan LEAF home from Newton Nissan of Gallatin. Justin gave me the call today (I missed the call while walking my dog) and left a message saying that the car has arrived and that I could schedule to pick it up tomorrow night.

:mrgreen: is how I look right now (probably). This is all I'm going to be thinking about at work tomorrow, haha!

:lol: Good for you ! I ordered since OCT 2010 and am still waiting. Hopefully it will come soon. Estimate delivery date Wk of JUL 25. Now passed

Do you mind me asking what dealer you ordered from? And have they given you a VIN yet? :?

 

[jwallace3]

Well so much for the theory that Leafs are automatically put on the dealers website when invoiced. Some may do that, but if yours (TNLeaf) is at the dealer as of yesterday and you're going to pick it up today, not all of them do it bc no Leafs are listed on their website. You have me hopeful that mine isn't too far behind. I keep crossing my fingers hoping for this week. Technically by Nissan's defenition week of means 7 days prior or 7 days after that date. That would mean that it could be here from July 28th to Aug 11th.

 

[TNleaf]

Well so much for the theory that Leafs are automatically put on the dealers website when invoiced. Some may do that, but if yours (TNLeaf) is at the dealer as of yesterday and you're going to pick it up today, not all of them do it bc no Leafs are listed on their website. You have me hopeful that mine isn't too far behind. I keep crossing my fingers hoping for this week. Technically by Nissan's defenition week of means 7 days prior or 7 days after that date. That would mean that it could be here from July 28th to Aug 11th.

I was going to make this comment a few days ago. Justin told me that he had delivered 7 LEAFs in July so far, and I had only seen 1 on the website. I think they worked out the kink in their system (that we were exploiting haha), and no longer automatically put them on the website. Mine never showed up. Also, Nissan of Rivergate and Newton Nissan use the same host for their websites. I noticed this when their websites were both down for a few hours one night (and they have the same format).

Waiting on pins and needles right now, about to head up to pickup the car. :mrgreen:

 

[jwallace3]

Well so much for the theory that Leafs are automatically put on the dealers website when invoiced. Some may do that, but if yours (TNLeaf) is at the dealer as of yesterday and you're going to pick it up today, not all of them do it bc no Leafs are listed on their website. You have me hopeful that mine isn't too far behind. I keep crossing my fingers hoping for this week. Technically by Nissan's defenition week of means 7 days prior or 7 days after that date. That would mean that it could be here from July 28th to Aug 11th.

I was going to make this comment a few days ago. Justin told me that he had delivered 7 LEAFs in July so far, and I had only seen 1 on the website. I think they worked out the kink in their system (that we were exploiting haha), and no longer automatically put them on the website. Mine never showed up. Also, Nissan of Rivergate and Newton Nissan use the same host for their websites. I noticed this when their websites were both down for a few hours one night (and they have the same format).

Waiting on pins and needles right now, about to head up to pickup the car. :mrgreen:

That's awesome! I bet you are. I'm not too far down the road at Streets of Indian Lakes. If I didn't have so much going on today I'd head down to check it out.

 

[LookoutLeaf]

At last I picked up my Leaf on THU 08/11/2011
I guessed there are more than 10 LEAFs in & around Chattanooga now. I would like to get together soon.
How do you think, TimLee ?

Silver SL-e
Reserved 4/20/10
Ordered 10/27/10
EV Project approved 9/14/10
Blink installed 6/29/11
Delivered: 8/11/11

 

[TimLee]

Waiting on pins and needles right now, about to head up to pickup the car. :mrgreen:

Congratulations TNleaf!!!

:lol: Good for you ! I ordered since OCT 2010 and am still waiting. Hopefully it will come soon. Estimate delivery date Wk of JUL 25. Now passed

Sorry you haven't received your Leaf yet. Only a few lower VINs than yours on the spreadsheet that don't show delivered yet.
You've shown a lot of patience.
Likely your order got initially delayed by the order SNAFU on the dashboard reservation system orders not getting transferred into the Nissan manufacturing order system.
The second major delay was that following the tsunami, Nissan canceled all orders in the manufacturing order system that hadn't been manufactured yet, and that their projections on resuming production wouldn't allow to continue on into production in sequence.
Orders in the manufacturing order system that were after the time they projected they would resume production were left in place.
So a lot of orders that were finally in the manufacturing order system after Nissan caught the order SNAFU problem, then got canceled because they fell within the 4 to 6 week time period that they didn't expect to be able to be manufacturing Leafs.
So a lot of orders that had already been delayed 3 to 4 months by the order SNAFU, then lost another 3 to 4 months because Nissan canceled the orders in the manufacturing system, and these orders were then at the back of the queue behind 2 to 3 months of much later orders.
The inflexibility of the Nissan manufacturing order system that required / dictated them to do that is completely inexcusable.

When I was at Mountain View Nissan in Chattanooga on 07-21-2011 for installation of the new Telematics Control Unit software that fixes the Carwings reset software bug, they had a red orphan Leaf on the showroom floor. A co-worker looked at it this weekend, and they then had a second orphaned Leaf.
I'm a bit surprised by that many orphans. More people who reserved them aren't taking them than I would have expected, but it has been a long time from the reservation till now and things do change. Or maybe some are deciding to wait and reorder 2012 with Cold Weather Package, or wait longer for 2013 with 6.6 kW charger?
I'm still shocked by how few orders are listed on the spreadsheet from Tennessee. Only 20 orders on there. Even if Tennessee has an extremely low level of participation in posting Leaf orders to the spreadsheet, it is still way less Leaf purchases in Tennessee than I would have expected when I first looked at the Leaf at the initial Versa test mule drive event in early spring 2010.
Come on Tennessee!!! It's a Great car.
How can you beat driving 40 miles per day for only $1 of electricity? A lot better than $5 to $7 of gasoline, or even $2.50 to $3.00 if you're driving a Prius III. And I think the Leaf is a LOT better than the Prius.

 

[stevedj98]

Hey everybody in Tennessee.

I picked up my personal license plate today. LECTRIC is now mine for Tennessee!

800 miles on the LEAF and still loving it. A guy today at the supermarket parking lot hoped that nobody ever damaged one of the headlights. "Looks expensive to replace" he said--and is probably right.

 

[jwallace3]

TNLeaf...I guess the "7 day" emails we used to hear about from the early orderers are a thing of the past. I haven't heard anybody mention them in the past probably 2 months or more and you never received one so.. Just hit me for some reason this evening and I thought wow, everyone used to get those before their Leaf arrived.... Now people just get a surprise phone call from the dealer.

As far as Leafs in Tennessee, there are many, but just not many participators on this site. The news the other day was talking about Franklin installing charging stations and that Williamson County had over 80 Electric vehicles registered. If there is 80 in just 1 county there may be well over a 1000 in the state or will be shortly. Our EV project area here is huge. I mean I fall into the Nashville EV project area and I'm 15 miles from Kentucky. I've seen several Leafs here, even several in one day, and even out in the middle of no where. The folks in Tennessee just aren't very vocal about stuff which is why there are very few on here I would have to guess. We just do. I would like to see the sales figures for the country broken down by state to see how many there are here. I'm sure not as many as California, but believe it or not Tennessee has the largest EV infrastructure/EV project footprint of any state in the program. You would think it would be out west, but I was surprised to find out its right here.

 

[TNleaf]

:mrgreen:
So I don't know where to start... haha!

Yesterday, Justin Garza of Newton Nissan picked me up from work (I was dropped off that morning to avoid making an extra trip out). He doesn't live too far away and offered to pick me up since he was leaving for the dealership around that time. That was very convenient for me, so thumbs up to Justin. I took a half-day from work and we arrived at the dealership around noon. Justin and I did the “orientation drive” and went over all of the features of the LEAF. I had my PIN and password for CARWINGS ready and we entered that in while going over the features.

After the orientation drive, it was back into the office to go over paper work and the like. All of this was very painless. Justin and I went over the quote and price we agreed on; there was SNAFU back in Feb with me getting approved for the EV project and getting my order changed to SL-e, but Justin honored our quote (he had to adjust for the $700 since the QC port is free on the SL-e). After agreeing on the numbers, Justin took the pile of papers and then next it was onto finance.

My finance manager was Bruce, and I have to say, Bruce made this by far the best car buying experience I've had. I expected to have to do some negotiating or have a stressful time when refusing GAP (since I made a large down payment) and the like. However, I didn't feel pressured as Bruce went over the options with me. Before I knew it, we were good to go and I was ready to sign papers. I went over the financials with him line by line, for my own sake, making sure everything was as I had planned and expected. I had planned on financing through PenFed at 2.49%, and they offered to beat that rate if I financed through them. When they offered 2.34%, I didn't refuse, and was excited to get a rate that low.

After the papers were all signed, I met Kelsey (the digital marketing manager), and met back up with Justin to go over the final things on the car. For some reason, CARWINGS accepted my PIN and password, however when trying to log on via my iPhone it gave an error saying that it wasn't setup. So Justin took care of all of that while I went over the last set of documents. Sooner than I realized, 2 and a half hours had passed, and I was now Newton Nissan's newest LEAF owner. While Justin was walking me to the newly detailed LEAF, I met Tad Drusky, one of the business managers, and we spoke for a few minutes about the LEAF, the Blink charging station, and how Tad was still awaiting the arrival of his LEAF. The entire experience at Newton Nissan was great. I'm thankful of those on the forums that posted about Newton Nissan (namely Brad), because to be honest, Newton Nissan was off my radar. At 46 miles away, I had looked at 3 closer dealers, and none of them felt right.

Onto my drive on. The temperature reading was 98 F outside so I had the AC set to 72, with the fan at 3 bars. The dash told me I would add 3 miles by turning it off, but I left Newton Nissan in ECO mode with nearly a full charge and wasn't worried about it too much (read: no range anxiety). From Gallatin to LaVergne is about 95% interstate/highway miles and the speed limits range from 55 to 70. I wanted to see what I could make without going too much slower than the speed limit, so I stuck with traffic and easily did 55 in the 55mph zone, ~60 in the 65 mph zone, and a few times I stuck with traffic and was doing 74 in the 70mph zone. For most of the trip, the speed limit was 70, so I stayed in the right 2 lanes travelling 60-65mph. At a few points on my drive home, I ended up just coasting behind several cars doing 58-60, so I in no way felt like I was holding up traffic.

So I pulled up to my final destination in LaVergne and had traveled 46 miles. I averaged 4.2 miles/kWh, and had a remaining 47 miles on the infamous “guess-o-meter”. Reading what others have posted about highway speeds, I felt that 4.2 mile/kWh energy economy was pretty decent considering the temperature and speeds. The drive from Gallatin to LaVergne was in no way close to my daily commute. I'll be on 30-45mph roads on 90% of my driving, so I'll report back when I get a few weeks under my belt. I'm hoping that I can get up to 5 miles/kW or better.

I've already taken 6 different people at work on a test drive, they have all been pleased. One person even suggested printing out a fact sheet, and keeping a few copies in the car to help answer questions people are likely to have. One of the big things I was asked was "how many miles per gallon?" My response: "There is no gasoline... but the figure that best answer your question is in Cost/mile"

I then go through the following rough figures. Let's assume I get 100 miles per full charge of the car (which is very likely at 4.2miles/kWh). And assume it takes 26 kWh of electricity to fully charge it to which I explain that the battery-pack is only 24kWh, but that you have to factor in efficiency of charging. I pay 8 cents per kWh at my house. So to go that 100 miles, it costs me $2.08. I then compare this to my 350Z. Let's assume on a good day I get 20mpg. Premium gas is ~$4 per gallon right now. So to go 100 miles in my Z, it would take 5 gallons. So to go that same 100 miles, it costs me $20.
$2.08-- 100 miles in the LEAF @ 8 cents per kWh
$20-- 100 miles in the 350Z @ $4 per gallon of premium
One of my friends pointed out that my Z is also only a 2 seater, where we took a drive and fit 5 guys in the LEAF. Another calculation I've done for my friends is the gas mileage in my 2001 Sentra. Which only gets about 25 mpg in my driving conditions.
$2.08-- 100 miles in the LEAF @ 8 cents per kWh
$14-- 100 miles in the Sentra @ $3.5 per gallon of regular

So to recap; I'm amazingly pleased with the service I received at Newton Nissan, the LEAF has been wonderful to drive, the LEAF has met my expectations so far and the LEAF generates tons of questions from friends and co-workers.

Me right now ---> :mrgreen:

(Sorry for the wall of text.)

 

[EdmondLeaf]

So to recap; I'm amazingly pleased with the service at Newton Nissan, the LEAF has been wonderful to drive and has met my expectations so far, the LEAF generates tons of questions from friends and co-workers.

Congratulations, so nice to hear about car buying experience that is noting but pleasure, enjoy your ride.

 

[jwallace3]

TNLeaf....That's great. Glad you finally got it and everything went smoothly. Hope my experience goes as good as yours.

 

[TNleaf]

TNLeaf....That's great. Glad you finally got it and everything went smoothly. Hope my experience goes as good as yours.

Hopefully you'll get the call pretty soon! To one of your earlier posts, I finally did get the email, yesterday, after I was already headed to the dealer! :lol:

I hope your (and anyone else still waiting) delivery is smooth. I planned and prepared, but the one I forgot was a copy of my insurance card. Just goes to show, there is always something! Luckily I was able to login from Justin's computer and print off a copy. If you've got any questions shoot me a PM.

 

[jwallace3]

TNLeaf....That's great. Glad you finally got it and everything went smoothly. Hope my experience goes as good as yours.

Hopefully you'll get the call pretty soon! To one of your earlier posts, I finally did get the email, yesterday, after I was already headed to the dealer! :lol:

I hope your (and anyone else still waiting) delivery is smooth. I planned and prepared, but the one I forgot was a copy of my insurance card. Just goes to show, there is always something! Luckily I was able to login from Justin's computer and print off a copy. If you've got any questions shoot me a PM.

I hope so too! Just as a side note, your Leaf is listed on newton's site now. No pic but VIN 5818

 

[TNleaf]

I hope so too! Just as a side note, your Leaf is listed on newton's site now. No pic but VIN 5818

HAHA, that's pretty funny. There should be two more (a red one and a blue one) that were on the truck as I was leaving. Probably Friday before they are ready for delivery.

 

[TNleaf]

Took a little trip out to Smyrna, TN and went by the Nissan Plant.
Guess what I found there?

A cutting edge of technology right in front of the Welcome Center!

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/media/set/?set=a.1406335175605.42628.1749196067

enjoy...

The address is: 983, Nissan Drive, Smyrna, TN, 37167-4405 United States

Ralph

Thanks again, Ralph, for checking this place out and posting what you found.

The significant other and I decided to take our first weekday adventure in the LEAF to find the local charging stations. I love the idea of charging on Solar Power and the Nissan Plant in Smyrna is less than 10 miles away. We took off around 5:45 and arrived around 6pm. The address above will get you to the first Gate (Gate 1), and coming from the south, it's the next right. You can't miss the Solar Panels in the parking lot.

The parking lot is pretty big, you can see the location here (note where the map is centered).
As we pulled in, we only saw 3 other cars there. 2 ICE cars in the regular parking spots and 1 Silver LEAF (a TWIN LEAF!!!) plugged into one of the Blink chargers.

I parked 2 spots away from the other LEAF (didn't want to crowd it if the owner happened to be there). Pulled out my Blink RFID and scanned it. Didn't work. Tried again (without reading the error); still didn't work. Carefully read the error on the screen, followed the instruction and it still didn't work. I tried the station next to it; the card worked perfectly on the first try. I moved my LEAF into that parking spot and plugged in. There were 9 Blink chargers total with just myself and the Twin plugged in.

We looked around to see if the owner was around, but we didn't see anyone. I then noticed the car had dealer plates and was plugged in but "Not Charging." We glanced inside and noticed the massive wear on the interior, and figured that it is probably a demo car. There was a laminated instruction sheet printed out in the driver's door pocket. I took a look at the VIN, and it was #101. With a VIN that low, no doubt it belongs to Nissan. We browsed the area which was very nice. The grass was very well maintained and there were several pairs of trees planted along the parking lot line (not blocking the solar array at all), so it gave off a very nice "park" vibe. Only thing it was lacking is a walking trail. I didn't see any signs saying not to walk on the grass or anything, but we decided to stay on the concrete sidewalks and got a view of the area. I plan on getting in touch with someone there and asking if they plan on putting in a walking path or if they would be opposed to visitors sitting in the shade under the trees. It could be a great place for a picnic type setup or a hour break under the trees reading a book.

Here's a picture of the solar panels and the two LEAFs.

Ralph had mentioned the visitor's area, where we were greeted by two of the zero emissions Polar Bears. There was a sign on the door saying that the visitor's center was closed at that time. I didn't see any hours posted, but as it was nearing 6:30, we just figured it was after hours. So after about 30minutes of walking around and soaking in the scenery, we headed back to the LEAF. 30 minutes of free Solar Energy was enough to add 8 miles to the guess-o-meter.

We had visited the Smyrna Rexall a few months ago before I took delivery of the LEAF, and as we headed home, we passed it again. So that was #2 for free public Solar Powered charging stations. Then I heard today that the Schneider Electric plant in Smyrna installed 2 Solar Powered (although I supposed the term is more technically "solar assisted") EV chargers. We will make an effort to check those places out and report back. (hopefully with more pictures and a more interesting story).

 

[jwallace3]

So I'm in Vermont this week and I get the phone call that they are expectin my Leaf in a day or two....This sucks. Anticipation is killing me and I don't get back into Nashville until late Friday night. Oh well, I guess at least my Saturday will be filled with excitement when I pick it up. Plus they'll have extra time to get it ready and charged up for me.

 

[TNleaf]

So I'm in Vermont this week and I get the phone call that they are expectin my Leaf in a day or two....This sucks. Anticipation is killing me and I don't get back into Nashville until late Friday night. Oh well, I guess at least my Saturday will be filled with excitement when I pick it up. Plus they'll have extra time to get it ready and charged up for me.

Good thing it wasn't a call saying it would be delayed another month or some bad news. Let us know how it goes! And a pre-congrats from myself!

 

[stevedj98]

If anyone is interested, there is a meeting of the "East Tennessee Clean Fuels" group coming up in Chattanooga.

CHATTANOOGA
Date: Friday, August 5
Time: 11am - 1 pm
Place: CARTA Conference Room, Next to Chattanooga Choo-Choo Hotel

I'll be there with my LEAF if anybody wants to look at it, play with it, or drive it.

Just so you will know, I checked out the two Blink chargers at the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Chattanooga this morning. Neither one of them is working. Both are stuck on "push here to calibrate" and won't start a charge when plugged in. Completely useless. I reported them to the hotel and Stephanie Cox at Ecotality in Nashville.

Steve

 

[JPWhite]

Just saying Hi

Got my LEAF this past Saturday from Newton Nissan. Vin 5734