A couple of new buyer questions.

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TreeStar

Active member
Joined
May 28, 2017
Messages
30
Location
Oregon City, Oregon
A friend of mine saw me over the weekend and wanted to talk to me about the posts he's seen me make on Facebook about the Leaf. He looked into them a bit as well, but I get the impression not nearly as much as me.

He said that many of the used ones are only getting a 30 mile range. He told me to look into that. That's something that would be known before buying it. Also, wouldn't that type of loss be covered under warranty? I don't know if that's a thing like he made it seem.

The other thing he brought up is these used ares are the ones coming off of a lease. Yes, of course.... But he said they're being shipped up here (the Northwest) from California. He lives off I5 and said he sees the trucks hauling them up. That is also something that can be known before purchasing with a Car Fax, right?
 
TreeStar said:
He said that many of the used ones are only getting a 30 mile range.
Maybe if you are doing 90 MPH or driving up to Sunrise on Mt. Rainier! If the car still has twelve bars, you should be able to go twice that far, at least, on a roughly flat road at "normal" speed (meaning up to about 60) without much anxiety. Maybe he means you can only make a 30 mile *one way* commute? That would be more realistic.

The other thing he brought up is these used ares are the ones coming off of a lease. Yes, of course.... But he said they're being shipped up here (the Northwest) from California. He lives off I5 and said he sees the trucks hauling them up. That is also something that can be known before purchasing with a Car Fax, right?
Yes, and if the dealer doesn't give you the CarFax, you can look up pretty much the same report for free here:

https://www.vehiclehistory.com/vehicle/land.php

Looking at dealer inventory around Seattle, I saw a car from Georgia (never actually looked at it, just from Carfax) and I test-drove three different California cars. The one I bought said "Fremont CA" on the Carfax info, and after looking into the "Previous Destinations" list on the nav computer, it looks like it was mostly driven around San Jose, so not a scary-hot environment (although not as good as if it was living in Pacifica and commuting to San Francisco).

Definitely dig into the Bluetooth phone list, where you may find the previous owner's name and be able to google-stalk them to figure out where their house is, and look at the saved destinations and previous destination in the nav system. If they didn't clear this data, it is gold!

I bought my car two weeks ago. It has an 85% SOH. Last Wednesday morning, I charged it to 100% on L2 at work. After driving around North Seattle streets plus a 3 or 4 mile 50 MPH leg up I-5, I parked it in my driveway Saturday evening without having charged again. LeafSpy said I had covered 95.7 miles and could have gone two more miles. I don't think my battery is exceptional. The other two cars had pretty similar SOH readings, so I suppose they would behave similarly.
 
BuckMkII said:
TreeStar said:
He said that many of the used ones are only getting a 30 mile range.
Maybe if you are doing 90 MPH or driving up to Sunrise on Mt. Rainier! If the car still has twelve bars, you should be able to go twice that far, at least, on a roughly flat road at "normal" speed (meaning up to about 60) without much anxiety. Maybe he means you can only make a 30 mile *one way* commute? That would be more realistic.

The other thing he brought up is these used ares are the ones coming off of a lease. Yes, of course.... But he said they're being shipped up here (the Northwest) from California. He lives off I5 and said he sees the trucks hauling them up. That is also something that can be known before purchasing with a Car Fax, right?
Yes, and if the dealer doesn't give you the CarFax, you can look up pretty much the same report for free here:

https://www.vehiclehistory.com/vehicle/land.php

Looking at dealer inventory around Seattle, I saw a car from Georgia (never actually looked at it, just from Carfax) and I test-drove three different California cars. The one I bought said "Fremont CA" on the Carfax info, and after looking into the "Previous Destinations" list on the nav computer, it looks like it was mostly driven around San Jose, so not a scary-hot environment (although not as good as if it was living in Pacifica and commuting to San Francisco).

Definitely dig into the Bluetooth phone list, where you may find the previous owner's name and be able to google-stalk them to figure out where their house is, and look at the saved destinations and previous destination in the nav system. If they didn't clear this data, it is gold!

I bought my car two weeks ago. It has an 85% SOH. Last Wednesday morning, I charged it to 100% on L2 at work. After driving around North Seattle streets plus a 3 or 4 mile 50 MPH leg up I-5, I parked it in my driveway Saturday evening without having charged again. LeafSpy said I had covered 95.7 miles and could have gone two more miles. I don't think my battery is exceptional. The other two cars had pretty similar SOH readings, so I suppose they would behave similarly.

What year is yours? 95.7 is all I'd expect out of a brand new one.

I've only started reading about LeafSpy, but from a standpoint of buying one. I need to find a beginner guide for that app.
 
I should add that the limitation on my commuting range would be if I had only L1 charging, not my battery. I plugged in the car at home on Saturday at 7 PM using the OEM 120V/12A unit. At 11 AM on Sunday, it was at "92% SOC" by the dashboard. I unplugged, drove a 3.7 mile loop do take my kid and a friend somewhere, and plugged it back in for four hours while I took a load of junk to the dump in my ICE and did some other errands. It only gained a few GIDs over where it was when I interrupted the charge at 11, so maybe that extra time was inconsequential for range, but clearly, if I needed to use almost all my battery capacity every day, charging for 12 hours every night would not be sufficient.

Maybe an aftermarket 120V @ 16A device would make some difference, but if you need to go full distance and charge only at home, a 240V system seems necessary. I only need to average about 20 miles per day, so even if I didn't have access to L2 at work, I could get by with L1 indefinitely.
 
TreeStar said:
What year is yours? 95.7 is all I'd expect out of a brand new one.
Sorry, I've been meaning to add a sig with that info. It's a 2013 SV.

Note that I was driving pretty much the whole time in B/Eco, and trying to be smooth, although I was not a *complete* snail when accelerating. I did make full stops almost all the time, not rolling though stop signs at 10 mph to hypermile.

On any closed-loop route, I am averaging at least 5.1 miles per kWh in town (dashboard and LeafSpy seem to agree on this). I pumped up my tires from 33 to 40 PSI Friday night, and I think that may get me a couple extra tenths. I'm going to stay out of Eco and drive more enthusiastically for a while now, for fun and as an experiment, so I'll probably eat up the gains from the tire pressure by using a heavy foot.

Have you studied the range charts WRT the miles/kWh and equivalent constant speeds? Look in the thread below and scroll down past all the 30 kWh and 60 kWh battery info. There are range charts for new, non-new but 12 bars, 11 bars, etc.

http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=101293

LS said my car maxed out at 241 GIDs when the charge stopped on Sunday. That would indicate that I have just a few percent more than the 230 maximum GIDs in the 11 bar or 82% table below, which agrees well with the miles I drove vs. the prediction of the 5.2 miles per kW-hour column.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sfufez3dcdvrvu9/LEAFrangeChartVersion7G82.pdf?dl=0
 
The corresponding table for "new" says 111 miles for 5.2 mi/kWh. I'm well short of that, by at least a 3 hour walk!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/d1d9htu2bqoaej8/LEAFrangeChartVersion7G100.pdf?dl=0
 
TreeStar said:
I would be getting a JuiceBox and using the L2 charge feature.
That would help!

I'm already kinda wishing I'd payed the extra $1000 for the car with the QC, even though I don't really "need" it since we can just take the ICEs on the one or two trips a month that need more range. Maybe in a couple of years we will get another Leaf with a QC, sell the beater old Subaru, and use the proceeds from the sale to put Blizzaks on one of the other cars for the rare times it snows.
 
The biggest, most common range-reducing mistake that Leaf newbies make is driving at 70+MPH. This drains much more power than accelerating rapidly. Nobody with say, an 11 bar Leaf is going to get just 30 miles of range if they limit top speed to 60-65MPH. More like 50-55 miles.
 
What does GID stand for?

I was told I should be seeing around a 70 mile range with a 2013. Obviously there's a considerable amount of parameters to take into account with range.

I can't imagine ever not driving in eco mode. I drive extremely conservative now. Unless the rare situation where flooring it presents itself.
 
I'm REALLY not qualified to answer, but apparently a GID is about 1/12th of a kilowatt-hour. It's shown on several screens in LeafSpy as the unit of energy currently in the battery. The long answer is this thread:
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7828&start=80

When I charge to 100%, the Guess-O-Meter (the dashboard display) says about 90 miles. If I leave home by the route that is gently uphill, it drops to 84 miles in a couple of miles. Even if I didn't drive carefully, I think I could get that far driving around the city on my usual routes, so let's say 84 miles is the worry-free range of my car at 35 MPH and no big net uphills. Edit: note that "big" is not that big a hill. Consider how much harder it is to ride a bike up a moderate grade to appreciate that idea. But if you turn around and come back down that hill, you can recover at least some of that energy, so closed-loop routes with some hills are OK.
 
LeftieBiker said:
The biggest, most common range-reducing mistake that Leaf newbies make is driving at 70+MPH. This drains much more power than accelerating rapidly. Nobody with say, an 11 bar Leaf is going to get just 30 miles of range if they limit top speed to 60-65MPH. More like 50-55 miles.

I don't drive fast. I mean do the math and see how much faster you will reach a destination by going a little further. Not to mention the potential for tickets. Not really worth it.

I just looked at a provided chart here. Looks like no more 60mph on the 55 freeway. heh
 
As you look at those range charts for different levels of battery degradation, you will see that the number of GIDs in boxes for 12 bars, 11 bars, etc. changes from chart to chart, so the number of GIDs in bar 12 indicates how much smaller your "fuel tank" has become when you lose battery health and switch charts.
 
Oops! I realized as I was coming home (while traversing some speed bumps, so maybe they shook loose the math in my brain) that I'd lost control of my decimal place above, which I've corrected. To repeat, a GID is about 1/12th of a kWh.

I'm getting about 42 miles per 100 GIDs, which reminds me that I need to get my kid a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
 
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