As y'all can see from my sig, I flipped my 2012 because, not so much the bars as the cold temperature, no heater, hypermiling it still couldn't get me home from work, 62 mi (100 km) round trip with no Charge At Work, when the temperature went below about 23 fahrenheit (-5 celsius). So I did check and Carmax and Tesla (AutoTrader) would only give me $10,000 or so for my fully-loaded SL, a car I purchased for $41,000, though obviously with a $7,500 kickback and $6,500 remaining on the financing, so more like $27,000 for 27 months of use. I had over 42,000 mi and would have hit 60,000 in just over 3 years, so would have had something like a 50-50 chance of missing out on warranty qualification (I have my last Ahr reading at home IIRC as part of my last LEAF Spy reading for that vehicle). But a 5-hour commute because you ain't got enough juice, with all the sacrifices already, to get to and from work was just untenable. So I had to take loss and flip to a 2013 LEAF SL, but fully loaded, $1,000 off MSRP (I miss the Zero-Emission Decals though). The dealership was nice enough to give me $15,500 for the trade-in ($9,000 after the payoff), and I put $3,000 down and agreed to about $87 in monthly payments on a 2-year lease (because I figured the battery wouldn't be enough to get me home after 2 years again) and a 40,000 mileage limit ($800) and a 50% residual (not that I'll take that). Overall, that put me in for $27,000 + $3,000 + $2,000 for 4 years, and about $1,000 in electricity ($1,000 for about 76,000 mi / 122,000 km) with a total annual cost of $8,250 or so per year of driving. Compare this to maybe $2500 for fuel and $1,625 for annual maintenance on the old ICE and that came to $4,125 per year, half of what the LEAF is costing me. So overall I still argue for EVs on a National Security / Domestic Energy basis but it's hard to get me to argue for them on cost after all I've been through. Sure, the ICE would be approaching $3,000 per year in Maintenance soon enough, and fuel would be $3000 per year in no-time too, but it's still less than $8,000 or so per year for the LEAF. I blame my employer for not letting me pay for electricity at work at even 300% or more of cost. And I blame Nissan for having a KBB value of $15,500 for best-market-value on my LEAF as opposed to a normal car at top condition with my mileage expected to go for $24,000 (according to Edmonds). I blame Nissan for that $8,500 loss and my Employer for the rest of my $20,000 net loss over what I'd hoped to be paying over a 4 year period. And when my current Lease expires, I would be happy to leave Nissan for a Tesla Model E as I'll never be able to afford a Model S with this loss on my books. Grrr. But anyway, good luck and I hope you can get bluebook on your LEAF at least!
(But man do I love the Leather and surround cameras!!)
BTW, can we get this board to support UNICODE?