asimba2 said:
Those with 2011 models have now realized 4.5 years of driving gas free. In my household, that would have saved me $12,000 in fuel, plus the savings from no oil changes or other ICE related maintenance. Makes the depreciation look not quite as bad.
I'm at 4 years / 40k miles now. Old car (Subaru WRX) was good for about 21-22 mpg with premium fuel. Average price of gas has been around $4/gallon over this time, so would have cost about $7,300 in gasoline.
I've spent about $1,600 in electricity (around 3.7 mi/kWh from the wall, 10,800 kWh at $0.15 / kWh), or about $5,700 saved in fuel costs.
But depreciation sucks. I sold the WRX for $9,000 after 8+ years and 100+k miles. Cost of the car was about the same as the LEAF - $25k including taxes / rebates. The LEAF is only worth about that much after half the time and less than half the miles, so in the end, it's probably about a wash or so.
This would be fine if the battery held up, but at 49 Ah it's down about 25% in capacity. I didn't expect to be here until 8 years of ownership or so, so the battery is losing capacity twice as fast as I expected. If the car started with 100 miles of range instead of 75, the capacity loss would be a lot more manageable.
Still, with used LEAFs to be had around $10k, it's tempting to pick another one up to use for local driving, but I hate to have two limited range vehicles. Makes a lot more sense to go with a PHEV which would tally on nearly the same number of EV miles but still get near-Prius like fuel economy on road trips and I don't need to buy a house with a bigger garage to park 3 cars.