I've always been a huge believer in washing my own vehicles. Not only do I find it therapeutic, it allows you time to pour over every inch of your vehicle, looking for potential maintenance problems down the road.
So today was the first wash for the LEAF and I found a couple of things.
The first thing I found was a small number of pin-head sized blemishes in my paint that I didn't notice on delivery. Now I'm not the first person to report paint problems with their new LEAF (though I am the first to report them publicly), and these are not massive. But they are somewhat annoying, and I guess I'm reporting them here now so that, should they become a bigger problem on that panel down the road, it's out there that this is how the problem started. This is on the rear hatch just below the rear window on the passenger side. Quite possibly something (solvent maybe) under the paint surface that has now come to the top and "popped".
The other thing I noticed is something we don't so much have to be concerned about in this neck of the woods, but could be a huge problem for those of you in more inclement areas down the road - there is an area just in front of the rear wheels that is going to be a magnet for mud and/or road salt that you are going to have to put extra effort into keeping clean. Otherwise (and this comes of many years of dealing with rust issues on British cars), I can virtually guarantee that area is going to rust out on you before the serviceable life of the vehicle has passed:
So today was the first wash for the LEAF and I found a couple of things.
The first thing I found was a small number of pin-head sized blemishes in my paint that I didn't notice on delivery. Now I'm not the first person to report paint problems with their new LEAF (though I am the first to report them publicly), and these are not massive. But they are somewhat annoying, and I guess I'm reporting them here now so that, should they become a bigger problem on that panel down the road, it's out there that this is how the problem started. This is on the rear hatch just below the rear window on the passenger side. Quite possibly something (solvent maybe) under the paint surface that has now come to the top and "popped".
The other thing I noticed is something we don't so much have to be concerned about in this neck of the woods, but could be a huge problem for those of you in more inclement areas down the road - there is an area just in front of the rear wheels that is going to be a magnet for mud and/or road salt that you are going to have to put extra effort into keeping clean. Otherwise (and this comes of many years of dealing with rust issues on British cars), I can virtually guarantee that area is going to rust out on you before the serviceable life of the vehicle has passed: