busybee fluffy rambles

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).

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.