Renting a Leaf

[gsleaf]

I'm considering renting a Leaf for a month to see if it would work for us. We would only have the 110-volt charger. Am I correct in estimating that it would give me about 5 miles of driving for every hour it was charging? If so that would probably work just fine for our needs.

Thanks!

 

[spike09]

I'm considering renting a Leaf for a month to see if it would work for us. We would only have the slow charger. Am I correct in estimating that it would give me about 5 miles of driving for every hour it was charging? If so that would probably work just fine for our needs.

Thanks!

Yes. Five miles per hour of charge is accurate. I used 120V for the first two weeks I owned the car and it worked out fine. My desicion to purchase a 240V unit was purely based on the added convenience. 240V home chargers are expensive. If you do buy a EV hold off on 240V as long as you can and hope you qualify for a free charger.

 

[gsleaf]

Yes. Five miles per hour of charge is accurate. I used 120V for the first two weeks I owned the car and it worked out fine. My desicion to purchase a 240V unit was purely based on the added convenience. 240V home chargers are expensive. If you do buy a EV hold off on 240V as long as you can and hope you qualify for a free charger.

How is it possible to qualify for a free charger?

 

[spike09]

Yes. Five miles per hour of charge is accurate. I used 120V for the first two weeks I owned the car and it worked out fine. My desicion to purchase a 240V unit was purely based on the added convenience. 240V home chargers are expensive. If you do buy a EV hold off on 240V as long as you can and hope you qualify for a free charger.

How is it possible to qualify for a free charger?

Primarily through the DOE grant to develop the EV charger infrastructure. The two companies involved are Ecotality and Blink. But it is limited to certain markets.

ChargePoint America is developing the following regions: Boston, MA; Bellevue/Redmond, WA;Sacramento, CA;San Jose/San Francisco Bay Area;Los Angeles, CA; Austin, TX;Southern Michigan; New York City, NY; Washington DC/Baltimore; Orlando/Tampa, FL.


Ecotality is developing the following regions: Phoenix (AZ), Tucson (AZ), San Diego (CA), San Francisco (CA), Los Angeles (CA), Portland (OR), Eugene (OR), Salem (OR), Corvallis (OR), Seattle (WA), Nashville (TN), Knoxville (TN), Memphis (TN), Chattanooga (TN), Washington D.C., Dallas (TX), Fort Worth (TX), and Houston (TX).

Atleast one Utility Company is giving a few away. Also generous employeers are installing chargers at their offices. Lastly Nissan has a Facebook sweepstakes that is giving away 50 chargers.

 

[leafwing]

Yes. Five miles per hour of charge is accurate. I used 120V for the first two weeks I owned the car and it worked out fine. My desicion to purchase a 240V unit was purely based on the added convenience. 240V home chargers are expensive. If you do buy a EV hold off on 240V as long as you can and hope you qualify for a free charger.

How is it possible to qualify for a free charger?

http://nissan.promo.eprize.com/sweeps/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[Roadburner440]

Nissan will not loan/rent you a leaf without a L2 charger. I just borrowed one from my local Nissan dealer for 3 days for free, and those folks were kind enough to do so. They made sure however that I had a L2 charger to charge the car. So if you don't have one it would probably be a hard sell.... They may let you drive it for the day however. A month seems a little prolonged, but I can understand why you would want to try the car for that long. My dealer was actually getting anxious to have the car returned cause customers were waiting to look at it. They got a car sale out of it, so hopefully that makes up for them letting me borrow it.

 

[tps]

Hertz rented me a LEAF for 2 days last July. They made no stipulation about charging. I already knew I was probably going to get a LEAF as soon as Nissan opened ordering in PA, so I bought an L1 charger from my local Nissan dealer and sent it to evseupgrade.com to have it modified for L2 charging. I made an adapter to plug it into my dryer outlet, which is how I charged the rental LEAF.

Sure enough, when Nissan opened ordering in PA, I place my order. For the last 3 weeks, I've had my own LEAF. I think I'm finally coming to terms with the fact that I don't have to return this one; I can now keep having the great LEAF driving experience as long as I want. I can't imaging ever going back to driving a "normal" car.

After I ordered the LEAF, I ordered a Leviton Evr-Green 160 EVSE for permanent installation in the garage. This is what I've been using every day, with the upgraded Nissan/Panasonic for portable and backup use.

 

[gsleaf]

I'm planning on renting from Enterprise and I have a good idea about my usage patterns and I'm fully confident the slower charging will work just fine for me. They didn't ask about charging at all when I originally asked about getting a charger.

 

[dgpcolorado]

5 miles per hour for 120 Volt charging might be a bit optimistic if you need to use heating while driving, climb significant hills, or if you plan to drive at high freeway speeds (70+ mph). Depends on where you live and what sort of driving you do.

Otherwise, it is a reasonable estimate of distance gained for an hour of charge time.

 

[gsleaf]

We'll be using heat some, but won't be going highway speeds too often.

 

[Roadburner440]

Ah. Enterprise or Hertz won't care if you have the L2. Probably will be banking on you not being able to charge so they can tack on all kinds of fee's. Before going to the dealer I tried finding a place to rent one for this same purpose, but not luck. So I wound up finding a willing dealer who would let me borrow the car for a number of days. After finding said dealer they were the one who got my order, and will get my money in the end. It actually turned out to be a good way to find a good dealer to work with in the end. Good luck with your rental though!

 

[gsleaf]

Ah. Enterprise or Hertz won't care if you have the L2. Probably will be banking on you not being able to charge so they can tack on all kinds of fee's.

Hmm, I thought they didn't charge you if you returned the Leaf w/out a full charge.

 

[spike09]

5 miles per hour for 120 Volt charging might be a bit optimistic if you need to use heating while driving, climb significant hills, or if you plan to drive at high freeway speeds (70+ mph). Depends on where you live and what sort of driving you do.

Otherwise, it is a reasonable estimate of distance gained for an hour of charge time.

From the following chart we can see:

Add 1 mile of range @60mph for every 12 minutes of charge at 120 volts.
Add 1 mile of range @60mph for every 5 minutes of charge at 240 volts.

That is driving exactly 60mph on a level road, no heating or AC, battery temp 70F and windows closed.

 

[tps]

Ah. Enterprise or Hertz won't care if you have the L2. Probably will be banking on you not being able to charge so they can tack on all kinds of fee's.

Hertz expects that you won't be returning the LEAF charged; there is no special fee, and they have 8 hours minimum of built-in 'down time' between reservations to allow time for charging. Since it is a self-service car-share, they ask that you plug it in when you return it. Unfortunately, once when I went to rent it, the previous renter had not plugged it in. I had them unlock the door remotely so I could plug it in. It was fully charged 2 hours later, but they still wouldn't let me take it, because their policy is 8 hours of charging time between rentals...

 

[Valdemar]

I'm considering renting a Leaf for a month to see if it would work for us. We would only have the 110-volt charger. Am I correct in estimating that it would give me about 5 miles of driving for every hour it was charging? If so that would probably work just fine for our needs.

Thanks!

When I rented a Leaf from Enterprise last summer they were charging $70/day, not sure if prices changed since then but $2k seems like a lot for this kind of "experiment". I kept it for a couple of days and that was enough for me to get a feel of the car and convince myself it would work for my needs.

 

[walterbays]

When I rented a Leaf from Enterprise last summer they were charging $70/day, not sure if prices changed since then but $2k seems like a lot for this kind of "experiment". I kept it for a couple of days and that was enough for me to get a feel of the car and convince myself it would work for my needs.

I agree.

First thing to do is take your annual miles driven, subtract miles from long road trips, and divide by number of days to get your average number of miles per day. E.g., 12,000 / 365 = 33 miles per typical day. So it's probably only the occasional atypical day you need to worry about. Write down a scenario of all the locations you drive on one of your bad days.

Next go to Google or Bing maps, or to Nissan's range simulator http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/index#/leaf-electric-car/rangeSimulator/index and calculate how many miles are in your bad day. If it's too far, and such days are likely to occur too often, and you don't have any good contingency plan for them like switching cars for the day, then instead of Nissan go talk to the Chevy dealer about a Volt.

If your bad day is clearly in range, then you probably don't even need to rent and test. But if there's doubt, then rent a Leaf for just one day and drive your scenario to see how you do.

 

[gsleaf]

It's $720 for 4 weeks which isn't cheap, but isn't too bad either.

 

[Valdemar]

It's $720 for 4 weeks which isn't cheap, but isn't too bad either.

Yeah, not too bad, although I still think 1 week should be all what one needs the most to evaluate the vehicle. Also you may want to buy extra insurance protection from the rental company as your own policy/credit card likely only covers collision/comprehensive for an "economy" car, or at least it is worth verifying with them if they will cover the Leaf.

 

[gsleaf]

Yeah, maybe I'll just do a week then. That's a decent plan.