New car

So the Odyssey van was starting to fail, transmission was failing and cost to repair was about 4 times the value of the car in good shape, time to update. I had been considering an electric vehicle for a while, looking around I found a used 2013 Nissan Leaf on sale at the dealer, a lease return. Took it for a spin and was satisfied with it, is in good shape, still shows all 12 capacity bars and a pretty good price. Took it home that weekend.

I have had the Leaf for a couple weeks now and I am quite happy with it. It easily gets from home to work and back again, even took a side trip the other day, no problems. I can plug in at work too so that helps in case I have to make a little longer drive after work.

Been reading about maintaining an electrical vehicle, a fair number of people are saying just charge to 100% every night, there won’t be any problems. Well, I set the timer to stop charging at 80%, this gives about 70 miles of range, more than enough for the day and the research does actually say that this is much better for battery health.

One drawback in not having an engine burning fossil fuels creating way more heat than is necessary is that the only way to generate heat is to use up the stored battery energy, run that too much and range is definitely affected. There is a useful feature on this model, when plugged in a timer can be set to heat up the interior at a specific time so when I head out on a cold day the cabin is warm. If I was programming the system I would have it maintain the temperature for a while if still plugged in instead of just heating it up and shutting off in case one is delayed.