New to this forum so bear with me.
I also was appalled at the Installation charge AV was hitting me with. 2 feet of wire, 1 hour max of work for $1300? C'mon! I complained and they knocked off $200 which really didn't make a dent. Although tempted to go the route of getting the charger separately and hiring my own electrician, I see two problems with that approach:
1) Permitting
I know it sound ridiculous but local municipalities have to approve the installation of a home charging device before it can be installed. This was one of the MAJOR sticking points in the MiniE program. My city absolutely refused (their reasoning is a long story) until BMW essentially bribed them with FIVE free MiniE's and gave me one free month lease payment. Although I could save about $800 with my own electrician, the permitting process for the charger could be no joke in my city. I hope Nissan is ready for this. To be honest, it is absolutely ludicrous that cities get involved with this when homeowners put in all sorts of other 220V applications without such red tape. Now, I may be wrong about this with the Leaf, but last year in June 2009 it was a real mess just trying to get that charger approved to be used.
2) Charger Availability
So other vendors sell the charging unit. What about availability? Wouldn't it make sense that when it came time to take delivery of your vehicle that AV would have a lock on the most of the availability of this charging unit? How long would it actually take for other vendors to supply the unit? And let's say you buy it directly from AV -- wouldn't they set aside their units for those people who are purchasing it WITH their installation?
Regardless, the cards are stacked against us. My local electrician witnessed the permit process needed for the MiniE charger (which is much better than Nissan's charger) and suggested this might not all go as smoothly as Nissan and AV plans.