parkwright said:
In other words, stop throwing good money after bad, cut your losses, don't buy or recommend a Leaf :x
Hi:
I personally would not go this far. It's still a very thin market with very few options and if someone came to me for advice on buying a new BEV, and was ok to suffer the depreciation on buying a new car (I generally am not, regardless of which car) then I'd say the upcoming Leaf looks competitive in its way with the Bolt and the Model 3... pretty much the only decent-range BEV options under $45k. I have lost track of whether Nissan has clarified making a 2018 that is fully competitive in range with those other two, and that would introduce some complication to the conversation, but assuming they come around to offer one that is up there in range, then it would have to be part of the conversation. Indeed, with so much experience and a fairly attractive-looking offering, I think a 2018 Leaf, if Nissan offers it with ~60 kWh, looks competitive to me.
Yes, there are pros and cons I would offer, and of course there are many complications, and the 100-150 mile range would certainly come into the conversation, and I would mention that gen1 Leaf buyers went through very steep depreciation. While arguably some of that is the math of the federal tax credit and some of it is early adopter inevitability, an additional reason is (arguably) that there didn't seem to be a good forward-thinking "gen1.5" battery replacement option offered, the way Renault maybe has done in Europe.
If a different conversation took place and someone asked me about buying a used Leaf, I wouldn't emphasize it as much against other used competitors, both BEV and PHEV. To be sure, it might have been really cool to recommend it if Nissan had been able to come up with some interesting official retrofit (such as a $10k 40 kWh battery replacement). However, they didn't do this, and so be it. It wouldn't make me leave the used Leaf entirely out of the conversation, but I would be very careful about it. For example, I'd recommend a used Volt for most purposes over a used Leaf, unless the person absolutely could not tolerate burning any more gasoline at all, and even then, I'd try to understand if they really could live with just a very short range used BEV.