Bye LEAF, Hello Niro

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Today the Niro became available for test drive and purchase, and I got the next available appointment. CarMax was super busy and they weren’t able to see me until nearly an hour after I arrived (ugh) but the process went pretty well.

I gave the car a test-drive and found that I really like it, and the OBD check showed no battery degradation whatsoever, so I decided to go through with the purchase. So now I have the nicest car I’ve ever owned (after giving the LEAF a little pat and telling it I appreciated our time together).

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Car updates

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Today I had an appointment at the Nissan dealership for them to appraise my car as part of a potential used-sale deal. They offered me $5500, or $6000 if I was willing to part with it same-day, and were giving me some pretty hard-sale tactics for an immediate agreement, but I told them that my replacement car hasn’t arrived yet and I couldn’t guarantee that I’d be actually buying the replacement.

They made me an offer of the full $6000 if I sold it to them now and just continued to borrow the car for the next week, but I again said no, as I’m not positive I’ll be buying the Niro.

This was also after they tried to FUD at me about the Niro, like they said that the Niro is “uninsurable” because of the break-in problems (which don’t affect the Niro, and the models which do have the problem haven’t had significant insurance difficulties either), and tried to bargain me into upgrading to a Leaf SV Plus, which is both outside of my budget and also doesn’t actually address the two critical issues I have with the Leaf (namely, CHAdeMO charging and a lack of thermal management on the battery).

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Car update

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I ended up paying the $700 to get the Niro EV shipped to my local dealership and reserve it for my purchase. All of the reviews of this particular model are quite stellar, and this specific car is an incredible deal (as far as I can tell it’s deeply discounted since it was a former lease vehicle but it’s still in immaculate condition). I should be able to give it a test drive in a week or so.

This isn’t my dream car but it’s a hell of a lot better than my current car in every way that matters. Plus, all of the reviews that touch upon winter driving say that it actually has really good traction control and only experiences minimal range loss. And it still has a much bigger (2.5x) range to begin with.

It’s annoying to be spending this money right now but I’m fortunate that I can swing it and don’t have to go into debt as a result.

2018 Nissan Leaf SL: first impressions

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So Carvana arrived today, and delivered my new car and took my old car away. The whole process was really straightforward and simple, and of course they gave me time to do a test drive before committing to the exchange. It was kind of sad to see my Mazda3 go away but I’m sure whoever ends up with it next will make much better use of it than I did.

Anyway! So now I have a shiny black vehicle from the future. It is really fun to drive, but also very different. It’s so weird to turn it on and to not hear an engine rev. It’s weird not having an engine to rev. It moves smoothly. One-pedal mode feels like how driving should have always been, and supposedly it’s better at power consumption so I will probably be using it a lot, at least for my city driving.

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Changing cars

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I’ve had my current car, a Mazda3, for nearly 6 years. It’s a great car. I like it a lot.

But, there’s a few things I’ve gotten somewhat fed up with on it:

  • It doesn’t have all the safety features I want (especially lane departure notifications and collision avoidance)
  • It costs a lot to maintain given how little I drive it
  • Its cargo space isn’t very flexible (since I have the sedan version)

For a while I’ve been thinking about getting an electric vehicle, and recently I got the idea planted in my head that it would be worth switching to a Nissan Leaf.

Anyway, on Carvana, I found a 2018 Leaf SL with all of the safety features I want, and also it still has around 135 miles of range (supposedly) and its battery is still well under warranty, and the cost was only a little bit more than what Carvana said the trade-in value on my Mazda3 was.

So maybe a bit impulsively, I bought it. It will arrive on Friday.

My cost after trade-in is around $1000, and it only raises my insurance premiums by around $8/month. So, yay.

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