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Used Leaf advice

3K views 23 replies 13 participants last post by  LettuceLeaf 
#1 ·
Hi All,

I've just got a new job which will involve a 26 mile round trip most of which will be on the M4. I cycle to work at the moment so I need to buy a car but being the carbon conscious type I really don't want to buy an ICE car. Based on my research over the past week or two a used Nissan Leaf 24k seems to be the best bet as even a 3 or 4 years old car should have plenty of range for my commute even in the winter. I'm totally on board with the idea of getting a Leaf - I love the idea of never having to go to the petrol station, they sound like fun cars to drive and, best of all, they are much cheaper to run and more reliable than normal cars. On top of that, our house already has a 3.3kw home charger that the previous owners used for their plugin hybrid.

The problem is, having looked at what's available on the market the prices seem quite high at the moment and I'm a bit nervous about whether paying 10-11k for a 2014 or 2015 leaf with 20-30k of mileage and 88-90% battery represents good value. (As an aside, it's a nightmare trying to get info on battery SOH from dealers). The relatively high price does affect the overall cost comparison between getting an equivalent ICE car, say a 15 or 16 Fiesta or Focus - there would definitely be a premium for owning electric even with the cheaper fuelling and maintenance costs. I'm happy to pay a small premium to get all the above benefits but I also don't want to be throwing money away if the prices drop back and I want to sell in 2-3 years. I've spoken to EV specialist dealers who have said that used prices have gone up over the past year or so and that this should reassure me in terms of depreciation but I'm concerned that the rise may be temporary due mostly to delays in getting new cars to market. Once the newer, longer range cars are more widely available, surely my leaf value is going to drop quite a bit? Do you think it would be better to get a fuel efficient ice car and wait for prices to drop again?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated - my heart is sold on getting a used leaf but my head isn't quite there yet. Thanks!
 
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#2 ·
The prices are relatively high because people have finally realised they've really cheap to run.
Typically cars that are cheap to run hold their value very well.
The leaf is very very cheap to run :)
The advent of the newer longer range cars hasn't dented leaf prices at all (so far).
Impossible to know the future. I honestly thought I'd have handed my 2016 leaf back at the end of it's PCP with no value in it all. Instead I "made" £2.5k even with a quick sale.
So clearly I have no clue ?
 
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#3 ·
If longer range cars will push down older EV prices, Leaf 24kWh should be dropping in price now, because 2019 loads of 30kWh came off lease. But it didn't, if 2014-2015 Leaf are still asking for near £10k........ I bought '64 reg 24kWh Tekna at 18k miles for under £10k back in Oct 2017.

26 miles daily is a bit low to really get fuel saving benefits......

I drive 55-60 miles everyday on M1, pretty much maximum you'd want to do in a 24kWh Leaf without charging. I have cut my fuel cost from £6 per day to £1.50. (55mpg diesel vs Leaf using 8p/kWh electricity) The car is pretty much paying for itself with fuel savings alone.
 
#4 ·
I bought my '15 Leaf 24 in Nov '17 with 13k on it for £11k. I sold it to a dealer last week with 25k on it for barely less than I bought it for, and it's now listed for sale on their site for rather more than I bought it for. However, I anticipate that this is absolutely a bubble. I think this time next year it will be 8-9k. When I started looking to sell ours in May there were about 300 used Leaf on Autotrader. There's now over 600.

So I'm not sure when prices are going to adjust, but I don't think it's far off - when the likes of the e208, Mini Cooper SE, ID3, Corsa-e etc are all on sale then used 40kWh leafs are going to look expensive, so they will push down. That will push 30s down which will push 24s down.

If the heart is set on Leaf then Head needs to get out of the way. I bought the Leaf as a head purchase (saved more on diesel than the total cost of insurance, tyres, depreciation, etc combined). It was never my kind of car (I've always loved bigger, more powerful and more premium cars) and yet it was actually one that I was deeply impressed by. Its built ok, and its comfortable enough. Handling was a suprise, because it corners very keenly (not communicative or throttle adjustable or anything, but huge grip from low CoG and centralised weight), and the drivetrain responsiveness is excellent. It's not especially fast at the end of the day, but FAR more accessible than a similar specification ICE. You'd never bother constantly wringing the neck of 1.0 ecoboost focus because of the NVH, and the hassle and effort of trying to drive a manual at full pelt, whereas I would regularly have foot to the floor in the Leaf (I should point out that my commute entails joining the M62 westbound @ J21, off again at J20, join A627M southbound, and vice versa - lots of join/leave, stop for traffic lights then accelerate up to 70, etc). What I'm saying is that it's easy and enjoyable to use ALL of the performance you've paid for in the Leaf, whereas in an equivalent ICE you'll rarely bother because of the hassle, noise and cost.

In short, the Leaf is a solid car to drive and entertaining in its own way, and the running costs are minimal. Even if it does depreciate a bit faster from here on, it's still not going to be depreciating worse than an ICE vehicle. As the country wakes up more and more to EVs then ICE depreciation will accelerate and EV depreciation will remain slowed by lack of supply of cheaper vehicles.
 
#5 ·
Exactly one year ago next weekend, I bought my 14 plate Leaf with an H2 service (major) and a years extended Cared4 warranty (that I have just successfully tested :) ). I paid £7800 and thought it was a lot of money. Now I'm very happy that I bought it when I did!

Agreed on everything mentioned above!

I still smile every time I drive it! It's the most enjoyable car I've had for a long time. Not only because it's a pleasure to drive, but because I can heat or cool it while having a coffee. Gone are the days of scraping ice or getting into an oven in the middle of a shopping centre car park (not that it happens a lot in this country)!

IMHO it's best to buy one with the winter package or the Tekna, (but it tends to be more expensive) so you have the heated steering wheel as well as the heated front and rear seats. I went for an Acenta with the winter package because I'm not a fan of the Tekna leather seats. Heated seats and steering wheel doesn't sound like a big deal, but to have them will save you battery power in the winter and is just a nice little touch of extra comfort.
 
#8 ·
I went for an Acenta with the winter package because I'm not a fan of the Tekna leather seats.
Agree with you there. I sat in a new Leaf Tekna whilst having my old Accenta serviced. Within minutes my back was aching and continued the rest of the day. Also like that Accenta has 16" wheels that give a softer ride and cheaper to replace.
 
#7 ·
Got my 64 plate Acenta on a PCP deal two years ago. It's just had its second "included" service, second set of All Season tyres (Nokian Weatherproof) and replacement discs and pads at the front and pads at the rear. It's been a great car. The PCP has another year to run, but I've decided to keep it at the end of the three years - which is not what I expected at the outset.

It's probable that depreciation will kick in again on the Leaf 24 (at the moment I'm pretty sure I could sell mine for very nearly as much as I paid), but the chances are it will be simply a resumption of normal service rather than a sudden plummeting. I'd be very surprised if a Leaf 24 bought now had more depreciation than a roughly- equivalent ICE, unless it was a very cheap ICE!

If you can afford it, do it! It's the right thing to do.
 
#9 ·
Sorry, please allow me to rant about car manufacturers putting biggest rims on highest trim level. It destroys ride, more expensive to replace tyres and easily damaged. The whole point of putting compressible air filled rubber on wheels is to use the rubber to deal with road imperfections. Large rims and thin tyres doesn't make any sense what so ever, except for showroom appeal. This trend of fitting larger and larger wheels must stop.

I bought Tekna for it's additional list of features over Acenta, but if I had the choice, I'd have the Acenta wheels, or even a 15inch steel wheel with aero hubcap.
 
#10 ·
On this I am in agreement. We got a Tekna primarily for the heated seats (had them for the past 10 years, couldn't be without, especially in an electric car), but the tyres were one of the most expensive parts of running the car.

I got a set of Crossclimate+ on one of the Costco michelin offers for £460. Meanwhile, a friend got a set of Primacy 4 for his Acenta on one of the costco michelin offers and paid £231.

Given that the Leaf tends to go through tyres somewhere between 20 and 30k miles, we'll say 23000 miles just to make the maths easy - 1p/mile for the Acenta, 2p/mile for the Tekna. Given that people discuss the use of E7 rates etc in order to lower the fuel cost from 3p/mile to 2p/mile, this is a significant factor.
 
#12 ·
Thanks very much everyone for your advice. There are some really solid arguments there that have reassured me re depreciation. I think I'll be buying knowing there's probably a bit of a bubble going on with used prices at the moment (well done to all of you who bought when you did!). That's against the background of massive uncertainty for the whole used market however with the switch to EVs about to take off in the next few years. I think it makes sense to say that an EV should not depreciate faster than a comparable ICE in that context, especially a leaf given their growing reputation for reliability. The more I think about it the more I know i would really regret not getting an EV at this stage.

I'm looking at 16 plate 24k acentas. Those within range all seem to be over 11k at the moment but I've worked out (literally on the back of an envelope) that total costs over 3 us should be around the same of not cheaper than the ICE alternative... So I think head and heart might be on the same page now which is exciting! Thanks again for your help- hopefully will be able to update once I've fully joined the EV club!
 
#13 ·
I've found a car a 24kw acenta at a local dealet that I'm interested in but I wanted to check the battery so I hooked it up to leafspy earlier. Unfortunately the readings I got didn't make sense so Im assuming I did something wrong in the set up. I'd be really grateful if someone who is familiar with leafspy can tell me if the readings look wrong. I did one reading before the test drive and one afterwards and the SOH read 101% both times. The car is 3 ys old so battery surely couldn't be up near 100%?
 

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#14 ·
People get very hung up on SoH.

We bought our 15 plate 24kWh in Nov 17, when it was 2.5yrs old. A day or two later a colleague helped me by lending a dongle, and the SoH was 88.4%. A disappointing figure, and one that I suspect points to the previous owner of the car having kept it forever at 100% SoC.

In the time we had the car, I largely kept it in the Goldilocks zone (between 30 and 80 SoC). SoH would vary between 88 and 89 mostly. Best ever single charge mileage was 89 miles from 100 down to 6%

In December 2018 we took a trip - one day we travelled from Yorkshire to my mother's house in Gloucestershire (rapid charges at knutsford, Stafford and frankley), charged overnight on the granny lead, then the epic next day was a trip to Exeter and back (rapids at Gordano, quick splash at bridgwater, taunton deane, exeter, granny lead for 1.5 hours at the Lexus dealer in Exeter, then rapid at bridgwater and michaelwood on the way back (better weather and tailwind coming back)). After a few days idle, I drove it back up to Yorkshire (hilton park and knutsford). About a week later I checked on Leafspy and SoH was now 95% - the highest that I ever saw. A month later it was still at 91%. By the time I moved the Leaf on a couple of weeks ago it had settled back to the lowest I'd ever seen - 87.99%.

The point of all this rambling is that from getting it to getting rid of it, our SoH worst case only moved by 0.4%, despite almost doubling the mileage on the vehicle (bought at 13.3k, sold at 25.5) and 19 months passing. In the intervening period I boosted the SoH by 7% simply by giving the car a run with multiple rapid charges in one day. The 101% you're seeing might be an artefact of the car recently having done such a journey. It might also indicate that the underlying figure is mid 90s, which is very decent for a 3 year old car.

I wouldn't personally be too concerned about it - maybe if I had been we'd not have bought the Leaf that we did and there was nothing wrong with that car.
 
#15 ·
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Those were some pretty epic trips! Unfortunately this car is being priced way too high in my opinion and the dealership are saying they don't haggle(!) so I'm running out of time to find a suitable leaf. It will be quite disappointing not to join the EV club at this point. Hoping it won't be too long though.
 
#16 ·
Depending on where along the M4 corridor you are, I'd suggest checking out an EV specialist dealer - some of whom post on this forum. Drivegreen in the Mendips, WeAreEV in bristol (who currently have formerly my Leaf for sale), etc - they will give you the time of day and talk to you about EVs, test drives, etc.
 
#17 ·
Hi redbluegreen,
Recently joined the EV club, via a 16'plate 30kWh Acenta Leaf that had done 48.5k miles, SOH via Konnwei Dongle & Leafspy Pro is c90%, key point is it's had nearly 400 rapid charges, plus c2200 slows, in my 9weeks ownership I've done just one rapid, plenty of "granny lead" at 2300watts.

BTW, one item that was pricier was insurance, and I did shop around!

I gather the usable capacity when new on a 24kwh is 22, and 30's are 27, so I've about 25kWh usable.
Enjoyable drive, but lots of overly complex controls for heat/vent, radio, speed limiter, cruise, which are not ergonomic to adjust safely on the move. And heaps more switchgear that I've yet to fathom out!
Is it possible to check battery % SOC partway through charging, without having to switch off mains feed, disconnect lead, power up car? The Renault Zoes display this on the dash while charging; can the info be sent to my smartfone?
 
#18 ·
I gather the usable capacity when new on a 24kwh is 22, and 30's are 27, so I've about 25kWh usable.
Enjoyable drive, but lots of overly complex controls for heat/vent, radio, speed limiter, cruise, which are not ergonomic to adjust safely on the move. And heaps more switchgear that I've yet to fathom out!
Is it possible to check battery % SOC partway through charging, without having to switch off mains feed, disconnect lead, power up car? The Renault Zoes display this on the dash while charging; can the info be sent to my smartfone?
The ergonomics of the Leaf leave a lot to be desired.... there are three different "settings" menus, for example, and some items are placed basically at random.

You can power up the Leaf to check SoC whilst it is charging. There is no need to disconnect the car - simply press the power button to power up the car (it will not allow you to drive while connected, but you can do things like program sat nav, check soc, mileage, cool/heat the cabin, etc), and then cycle through the instrument binnacle centre display using the overlapping square button until you see SoC.

In theory yes, you can see the charge status (not %SoC, but the 12-bar gauge) from the nissan app, but nissan broke the app a while ago and I never got it to work ever again.
 
#19 ·
Thanks for all the info. Just picked up my 15 NL acenta today. Exciting but also a bit nervous to see how good the average range is over the next few weeks. SOH around 87% so I know I'll lose a bar sooner or later. I plan on not worrying too much about the SOH and focusing on squeezing the most efficiency out of whatever the capacity is. Really enjoyed the first run home trying out the different driving modes.
 
#20 ·
Congratulations :)

Your commute sounds very similar to mine (~25 mile round trip, including a stint on M60, then A627M).

As a general rule, on my 15 plate 88% SoH car I used 40% SoC per day for that commute. Sometimes less in summer, sometimes more in winter. Pre-heating attached to a home charger will reduce that. I also had a tendency to use full throttle joining the motorways, and keeping pace with the fastest traffic (in other words, I could have driven it more efficiently for commuting than I did).

40% is also about how much charge you get in 2 hours at 3.3kW (all my leaf supported), and my workplace charger works in 2 hour chunks (50p for 2 hours, up to 22kW - a good deal for zoe owners!). The routine that I settled into was to run the car down to <40%, then put 50p in the meter and go up to 70-80% or so. This kept the battery in the optimum SoC range for minimising degradation, and the results were as I mentioned above.

If you don't have workplace charging, I'd suggest using home charging with the 80% limiter set on, and a climate timer to warm up in the morning from the mains. You should get home each day between 35 and 45% SoC.
 
#21 ·
That's the sort of routine I'm hoping to set up. I don't have charging at work so I will be relying on 2-3 hrs a night probably. I'm looking at the Octopus go tariff to charge it on a timer between 12:30 and 4:30 with the 80% limiter set. I haven't looked at the climate settings- I had assumed that was something I'd only need to do in the winter but will definitely do it if it improves efficiency.
 
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