Electric car facts

It has been almost 2 years of driving the Nissan Leaf!

So far it has lived up to its promise. A quiet ride in carpool lane for local commuting. 

Given my kids tell me that I drive like an old grandma, it is no surprise that the leaf has 5 miles/kwh. Leaf forums tell me that this is a pretty good record for a car that has since seen 15k + miles

One intersting thing is that the Leaf gives you an estimated miles left as you drive.. and that can sometimes be like the Windows File download or copy dialog box "time remaining" prediction!

You drive 3 miles and get back 5 more.. then you drive back 4 miles and lose 9! Net result is that the car was driven 7 miles and it shows 4 miles consumed. These numbers are also a function of recent trips and who knows what logic?!

One gets used to this after some time. Also if you remember which routes have roads that slope down vs. roads that slope up, you can optimize your mileage!

Only downside this year is that the Leaf is behind on the 10k mile per year we signed for in the lease. So far the dealership is getting a better deal. 

The charger is now fixed and the car is back on the road! These photographs were taken few weeks ago on a route that always makes me laugh when looking at the dashboard.

Here is to more fun!

3k and counting..

The Leaf hit 3k miles and the mileage per week is now decreased. One probable reason is that there are no zig zag routes being taken to go to work to avoid traffic. Get to zip through in the carpool lane. 

Getting 4.7 miles/kwh and the Leaf Forums tell me that anything above 4.5 is a great rating for energy efficiency.

So far, sooo good! Good thing the car was leased because the 2013 Leaf already has a 20% increased range than this 2012 Leaf! Hopefully the 2015 Leaf will go 250 miles to a charge and will go buy that in 3 years.. one can always dream on.

Turning a new leaf

The new electric blue Leaf is a joy to drive!

Will post a detailed video review of the whole Leaf experience this weekend.

Bascially it works like this from a money perspective.

The fully loaded vehicle costs ~36-37k (expected to drop another 3k next year)

You pay 3k (including a down pay, license, registration including first month lease payment)

You get ~10k in instant rebates (Federal etc.)

You also get a 2.5k rebate from the state.

Given the fact that this is still new technology that is rapidly improving, (used a friends advice on this) it was better to lease for 3 years with a max restriction of 12k miles / year and if you exceed you pay 15 cents/ mile to the dealer (unless you buy the car at the end of the 3 years.

The residual works out to be 17k.

12k miles/year is 1k miles/month and assuming 20 weekdays per month translates to 50 miles a day.

This car is fully electric and takes 21 hours to fully charge with 110 V or ~4 hrs to charge using a 220V outlet (which will be installed in your house if you go through an elaborate qualification process through the city and some agencies), but it can be done!

Here are the highlights and a few lowlights

Highlights :

Driving limits: You get to go 110 miles total in a charge if you average 45 mph. If you hit 60 for like 20 minutes it drops the mileage by a good extra 10 miles like when we had to drive it back from the dealership on the freeway.

I drive 27 miles round trip to work and back everyday in local freeways or expressways where the top speed is 55 mph for brief seconds when I get to press the gas pedal (errr. accelerator!). Also drive ~9 miles round trip to Yoga every day. Local trips like taking kids to Kumon or other classes, visits to Indian Grocery store, Target etc. is around 4-6 miles round trip which happens every alternate day.

In total ~40 miles during a weekday and maybe 20 miles on weekends for local trips which works out within the 12k/year limit. Anything longer like going to SFO, Livermore etc. we can take the other vehicle.

Comfort :

This car is quiet. Real quiet. Quieter than a Prius if you can believe it! The seats are amazing and have heating.. the kids call it "butt warmers" and work for all seats. The steering wheel can be heated. So if you dont want to heat the entire vehicle to save energy you heat your butt and steering wheel and can drive warm! Turning on the AC to heat or cool cuts down 10 miles out of the total 110 mile range (~ 10%) given our local Temperature differences in Cupertino.

Music system is out of the world. It has radio AM/FM, XM radio, CD, MP3, Aux port to connect devices and has bluetooth so you can just play your iPhone through the speakers.. dont have the song on your iPhone playlist? No problem. Search on youtube, play and the sound goes to the system wirelessly! The kids are loving it. Next they want the video to play in the info panel so they can watch as well ! (Nissan please take note). There is also a USB port. Have all your songs as MP3 or WMV ? No problem. Just take an 8GB pen drive, shove all your songs into folders and it just plays it! There is one downside though that I detected yesterday. Only MP3 plays. MP4 does not. So I had to go download a free utility to downgrade my MP4's to MP3's.

Navigation:

This thing comes with a nice navigation system. For a car that can only go a max of 110 miles (55 miles roundtrip) the Navigation seems like an oxymoron. But there is a good reason for it. The car tells you if you can make it back before you start anywhere and also puts nearest charging stations on the map. Given you cannot just go refill instantly, this does come in handy.

Gizmos galore :

There are fine adjustments to everything comfort related which is totally cool.The whole charging cable fits in a cute backpack which is anchored to the trunk. You can track all car stuff online as the car communicates everything to a website. It even has a name. We aptly named it PARNA ! 

The little one understood the meaning and the pun immediately!

At the end of the day a great ride and given my Sienna was averaging just below 20 miles a gallon for the same ~12 miles a year.. we save 600 gallons in gas which is ~2500$. This is a wash with what we pay for the car. Electricity will be ~30 bucks a month and with rebates can be as low as 10$/month.

For starters this experiment is working out great. Will keep posting updates on how this goes every few months. Thanks to all my friends who recommended this during the Xmas break! We should have a Leaf party soon..

A few fail the many

Watched the movie "Who killed the electric car?" recently. It was a documentary and the fact that it was put on top of the blockbuster online queue drew a lot of criticism from the wife and my queueing prvileges have been revoked for even putting this movie on the list!

Being the pro-green dude that I have become, it was an extremely difficult documentary to watch. Even more difficult that the Al Gore documentary. If Al Gore's "An inconvenient truth" showed us where the world is headed and beseeched us to find solutions, this movie was a reality check.

The solutions are already there. We just won't let them out! The best part of the film was I got to see the Ovshinsky's (Stan and Iris) who between them hold 200 patents, came up with so many things that cross my world today be it solar cells, Nickel metal hydride batteries, fuel cells, Chalcogenide based Phase Change Memories (PCM's) etc. etc. It was my dream to meet them in person some day! The couple had actually come up with a cheap long lasting battery technology, that made the electric car, cost competitive against gasoline based cars.

Apparently, Chevron bought a major stake in their company and shelved the technology because it threatens the existance of the gasoline based car as we know it!

Why would I buy a Prius if there was an EV1 option? I do not know!!

This post is not about the electric EV1 or Prius or environmentalism or technology.

It is about how a few people who decide the fate of many invariably make decisions which do not comprehend the responsibility of that decision making. It is almost a disease with politicians today, that when it comes to making right decisions, they invariably do what is right (economically for them, in their minds, at that time, or for their interests) as opposed to doing the morally right thing (which would be the greatest good for the greater many, right by the planet, looking forward to the future).

I would also be the worlds greatest bigot if I expected politicians and leaders to do that when an average citizen of the world cannot do the same thing, more particularly, if I cannot do that!

Given a choice between spending extra to solar power our home and continuing with the power grid, we chose the power grid. Given a choice to sell the old car and buy a Prius, we chose to keep the old car as long as it runs and save money. The same thing happened with a lawn in the backyard vs. synthetic turf! So many similar choices where we could have made a difference to the world or aorund us where the economics of the situation trumps the dogooder options.

In a world where it is each man for himself, where states protect their vested interests by erecting dams to control river water flows, where humans murder fellow humans by the hundreds of thousands every year in the name of religion, resources, security, and many other such things which really have no boundaries if you look deep enough, there is no hope for the many to expect the chosen few to do right by them. There is not even much hope for the many to expect the other people described by "the many" do the right thing!

Why have I suddenly become so self absorbed, self deprecating, guilty, etc. etc. Well in a way, my internal justification for doing a lot of things in this life was that technology would make this world a better place. After watching this movie, it has become apparent that the only technology that will make it into the world and its people are those that do not threaten today's rich in anyway.

Now that is a depressing thought, isn't it?

ps. This does not mean I will curl up into a ball and go sleep in the dark. Far from it. Life goes on. One can always hope that Ratan Tata will make a solar powered vehicle that gives the "Nano" a run for its money, or the Chinese will realize that they could get out of oil dependence and pollution by going to small Electric Vehicles. Yes! We can keep dreaming. It could happen....

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