[NeilO]

Hello, I am thinking of buying a used 24kw Nissan leaf tekna to replace a petrol car. It will only be used for local journey's with a budget of max £8000.

Any advice on what to look out for been looking on autotrader, lots on offer but prices seem all over the place, and sometimes you can't see if it has 11 or 12 bars or what onboard charger it has.

Any general advise would be appreciated.

 

[HandyAndy]

You could get an Ampera for that money on here, around 45 mile range summer, 30s in winter, and unlimited petrol for occasional trips out. But only 4 seats & not as much luggage space. No battery degradation issues whatsoever, unlike the Leaf 24s! I think the Leaf 30s have & newer have much better batteries, others will advise.

 

[DanP]

Most £8k Tekna's will be on 11 bars I'd say (79 - 85% SOH) and if 12 soon to be 11! You could download Leafspy and an OBD dongle to find out the precise SOH.

Depends on your usage but if it's mainly local journeys and you have access to other cars I'd probably not be too worried if it's the 3.6kW or the 6.6kW onboard charger - the latter was circa a £1,000 option so not that common.

We've had 3 x Leaf 24's - they're very solid cars overall, would be more concerned to get one that's been looked after well and priced fairly and do the usual car checks. It should come with the 3 pin granny charger and hopefully a type2 to type1 cable.

One thing to make sure is that it's battery owned not leased - most will be but worth making sure! If you put the reg into a site such as Total Car Check - The lowest cost car check in the UK! and it says "Flex" then be careful as it may be leased battery. (NB you don't need to do the full check there to see if it's Flex, but I would do an HPI/ equivalent somewhere before buying one)

From a quick look something like this would appear to be a pretty safe bet IMHO: (NB car is nothing to do with me!)

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/202011136074805

2 owners, they've had it 4 years, low mileage, looks clean and tidy inside and out, comes with the cables, charger if you want it, pretty clean MOT history etc:

https://regisearch.co.uk/registration_search.php?registration=ao65+nrl

Ref Andy's post above - not sure you'd get a 30 for that money (unless a high mileage Acenta) and from what I've seen they suffer from worse battery degradation (more cells packed into the same space) so don't have better batteries!

Edit: In case you're not aware I'd say for an 11 bar Leaf24 you're looking at ballpark 60 mile range this time of year and say 80 in Summer but YMMV!

 

[NeilO]

Most £8k Tekna's will be on 11 bars I'd say (79 - 85% SOH) and if 12 soon to be 11! You could download Leafspy and an OBD dongle to find out the precise SOH.

Depends on your usage but if it's mainly local journeys and you have access to other cars I'd probably not be too worried if it's the 3.6kW or the 6.6kW onboard charger - the latter was circa a £1,000 option so not that common.

We've had 3 x Leaf 24's - they're very solid cars overall, would be more concerned to get one that's been looked after well and priced fairly and do the usual car checks. It should come with the 3 pin granny charger and hopefully a type2 to type1 cable.

One thing to make sure is that it's battery owned not leased - most will be but worth making sure! If you put the reg into a site such as Total Car Check - The lowest cost car check in the UK! and it says "Flex" then be careful as it may be leased battery. (NB you don't need to do the full check there to see if it's Flex, but I would do an HPI/ equivalent somewhere before buying one)

From a quick look something like this would appear to be a pretty safe bet IMHO: (NB car is nothing to do with me!)

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/202011136074805

2 owners, they've had it 4 years, low mileage, looks clean and tidy inside and out, comes with the cables, charger if you want it, pretty clean MOT history etc:

https://regisearch.co.uk/registration_search.php?registration=ao65+nrl

Ref Andy's post above - not sure you'd get a 30 for that money (unless a high mileage Acenta) and from what I've seen they suffer from worse battery degradation (more cells packed into the same space) so don't have better batteries!

Edit: In case you're not aware I'd say for an 11 bar Leaf24 you're looking at ballpark 60 mile range this time of year and say 80 in Summer but YMMV!

How weird, that was one that was on the top of my list.

 

[i-s]

We had a Leaf 24 Tekna for 19 months before replacing it with the 3SR+.

The Leaf is a mostly solid, good car. 2014-2015 will be expected to be dropping the top bar around now.

We bought ours when it was 2 1/2 years old (15 plate, purchased used in nov 2017 with 13300 miles). The SoH when we got it was a very disappointing 88.4%. However, I only ever charged it to 100% 5 or 6 times over the 19 months that we had it, and almost always had it between 40% and 80% the rest of the time. I put 12000 miles on the car over the 19 months and at the end of that the lowest ever SoH was 87.99%. In other words, after the (large!) initial drop, degradation was negligible if looked after. Since you're only planning to use the car locally and can manage the charge between 40% and 80% (and being the 24kWh, it will have the 80% limiter) then degradation should effectively not be an issue - even if it loses 5% SoH over 5 years, it will still be perfectly useful.

General advice - Acenta will be significantly cheaper to run because the 16" tyre size is much cheaper (about 1/2 the price - I figure it worked out about 1p/mile on acenta (23k miles from £230 of michelin tyres) to 2p/mile for tekna (23k miles from £460 worth of michelins). There are cheaper options of course, but the tekna will be always be more expensive). Some stuff on the Tekna is good (LED headlamps (Acenta halogens are poor), 360 cam, heated seats), some stuff is meh ("leather" seats, Bose stereo), some stuff is bad (17"s). I'd prefer an Acenta with heated seats (rare pack)

Stuff to watch for - driver's side front strut top corrosion (windscreen wiper drains to it), drive shaft clicking (drive on full lock and come on/off throttle, listen for clicks/cracks - driveshaft needs regreasing and tightening), brake seizing (mine seized on the inside pad of OSF - very hard to tell from looking. May make scraping noise when on full lock).

 

[NeilO]

So what we looking at for winter range with let's say 11 bars?

 

[i-s]

So what we looking at for winter range with let's say 11 bars?

Almost exactly 1/3rd your SR+.

50 miles (cold, rain, 70mph, heater on) to 90miles (25c, no AC, 60mph behind a lorry). With the same provisos, your SR+ would have been 150-270.

 

[NeilO]

Almost exactly 1/3rd your SR+.

50 miles (cold, rain, 70mph, heater on) to 90miles (25c, no AC, 60mph behind a lorry). With the same provisos, your SR+ would have been 150-270.

Model 3 has gone! Waiting arrival of new EV. Spoiler, it arrives this Friday. Model 3 wasn't great in winter conditions. Also seemed to have a major phathom drain problem. Might go with a 30kw leaf then.

 

[DBMandrake]

We just bought a 2016 30kWh Tekna a few months ago and on the whole we're very happy with it.

My thoughts are that if £8k is your budget, look for an Acenta rather than a Tekna, and you'll get a lower mileage, better battery health better condition car for the same money.

All else being equal you're going to pay about a £2k premium to get a Tekna instead of an Acenta in that price range, perhaps more and you need to decide whether that is worth it.

The Tekna gives the following features over the Acenta:

1) Bose Subwoofer - Meh, it's OK but I wouldn't miss it if it wasn't there, and it adds a large object in the boot taking up room in the boot.

2) Birds eye camera view - it's actually quite nice now I have it (especially as my work car space is between two poles and difficult to line up into with limited turning space) but I wouldn't choose the Tekna spec just to get it. The Acenta still has a reversing camera.

3) "Leather seats" - these are a bit of a disappointment to me to be honest. Pretty sure its fake leather, they're pretty hard and to be honest I find the drivers seat quite uncomfortable due to the way the pointy side bolsters on the base dig into my legs and the insufficient backwards tilt for long legs means not enough thigh support and I've had to customise the seat with additional padding to make it acceptably comfortable. I haven't tried the cloth seats on an Acenta though so I don't know if they're any softer or more comfortable or whether they're equally bad. Perhaps someone familiar with both can comment on their relative comfort.

4) Heated seats and steering wheel - these work pretty nicely actually and were the main reason for choosing a Tekna if I'm honest, after driving a Peugeot Ion which had a weak power hungry heater and required after market heated seat covers to get by in winter. However.... the heater works so well in the Leaf and has such little impact on the range compared to the Ion's heater that while the warm seat and steering wheel is nice I think in hindsight I could have easily got by without the heated seats and steering wheel and still been comfortable.

5) 215/50/17" wheels vs 205/55/16" wheels on the Acenta. Yes they look better than the Acenta wheels but the ride quality is not great especially now I have stiff XL rated CrossClimate+ tyres on it - I'd go so far as to say its pretty harsh actually with these tyres and it was only "acceptable" on the original Dunlops. Also as mentioned already tyres for the 17" rims are about twice the price of the 16" rims, and there is far, far less choice of tyres for the 17" rims, not very much choice really. I actually kind of regret going for the Tekna a bit due to the wheel/tyre/ride comfort situation and I'm actually considering buying some Acenta wheels to use in the summer on more comfortable riding summer tyres and just use the 17" with the CrossClimate for a few months each winter now that I'm stuck with them...

So, if your budget is under £10k and you want a car in good condition, low mileage, good battery health I'd definitely recommend checking out some Acenta's. It's certainly going to be a lot cheaper to buy, and cheaper to run (cheaper tyres, slightly better driving efficiency on the smaller wheels) than an equivalent condition Tekna.

 

[DBMandrake]

Model 3 has gone! Waiting arrival of new EV. Spoiler, it arrives this Friday. Model 3 wasn't great in winter conditions. Also seemed to have a major phathom drain problem. Might go with a 30kw leaf then.

If you're now considering a 30kWh Leaf add on another £2-3k vs a 24kWh model.

Range is about 30 miles more than a 24kWh model. So about 80-115 miles vs 50-75 miles.

If you're trying to keep a minimum safety buffer of 20 miles available then the difference is more than it seems, as you could do 30-55 miles in the 24kWh with 20 miles left and 60-95 miles in the 30kWh with 20 miles left.

On my 38 mile a day commute I was getting a full charge range of about 115 miles in July and currently around 95 miles in 4C weather with the heater set to a comfy 22 degrees.

Whether the extra range is worth it depends entirely on your likely use scenario - for me it's well worth it as it's our main car.

 

[NeilO]

Max daily journey would be 40 miles. So not sure if the extra expenses is worth it. Nice to have a 30kw. 👍