by BeauV » Tue Oct 06, 2020 6:13 am
Steve,
It's really hard to answer your question about a lifetime for the Leaf battery. It depends on a lot of different things including the number of deep cycles, the temperature at which the battery was operated, the temperature at which the battery was charged (cold charging is hard on them), not leaving the battery sitting for long periods dicharged deeply or completely charged up (they like to be stored between 25 adn 75 percent), and the sophistication of the charging circuitry (which I don't know at all). There is a total number of lifetime cycles, just like most batteries. Initially, folks thought Prius batteries would only be good for 100,000 miles, but that turned out to be false with many battery stacks lasting much longer than the rest of the car because they are only shallowly discharged in a hybrid.
It's interesting to note that the Leaf comes with a 100,000-mile warranty on the battery. If you're not doing a long commute, you could drive the thing a long time before getting to that. Basically, the owner is asking about $1/mile if you assume a 100,000 mile lifetime. The only other cost will be tires. It might be a really cheap way to get around town if you like the car.
Your Ford at 27 MPG is probably costing you about the same amount when you include maintenance, fuel, oil, brakes (I don't know if the Leaf does regenerative braking, but Teslas get about 80,000+ miles on one set of brakes, we're at 70,000 miles with almost no wear on the pads and rotors - they never get used.). It maybe that on a per-mile basis, including depreciation, the Leaf is a lot less expensive than the Ford. That has been our expereince. Our Ford SUV costs about 2.1 times as much to operate as the Tesla SUV, even though it was 35% more expensive.
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Beau - can be found at Four One Five - Two Six Nine - Four Five Eight Nine
