What It’s Like to Own One of the Cheapest Used Evs
The sales of pure electric vehicles are shooting up every year worldwide. The sales of plug-in passenger vehicles achieved a 9% global market share in 2021, compared to 2,5% in 2019. Norway is a world leader in electrification with 78,7% of all vehicles sold in 2022 being purely electric and 91,9% being plug-in vehicles. It just shows that the mindset of people is changing, and EVs are becoming more popular every year.
As EVs get more popular and countries are trying to push them in, the demand increases dramatically. Combined with the enormous progress of battery technology, the price of battery production is dropping rapidly. Since 2010 the average price of battery per kWh has fallen from 1200$ to 132$ in 2021.
But still, EVs are relatively expensive to buy for the majority of people, and the savings are just not enough to compensate for it. Or are they?
Buying a used EV
The market for used EVs is bigger daily, and prices are much more friendly. Some of the EVs hold their value better than others. The old Nissan Leaf owners are not in the happy group. With the starting price of 32 000$ in 2011, the price dropped by more than 2/3. You can now get a used Nissan Leaf for as low as 4000$.
After searching, we decided to get a 2014 Nissan Leaf with the original battery. We already own one ICE (internal combustion engine) car, so we figured out that buying second car electric instead of an ICE car, would be an interesting experiment. And so we did it.
We bought the car for roughly 9000€ which is about 9023$. The car shows battery degradation in form of 12 bars on the dash. Twelve bars means full, original capacity. Our car showed 11 bars with 74 000km (46 000miles) on it. Unfortunately, after about a year of driving it, we lost another capacity bar. That means that currently, the car has about 80% of the original battery capacity after 8 years with 95 000km (59 000miles) on it.
The range
The car now estimates that the range on a full charge is something between 130–147km (81–91miles). We found out that the car's estimate is not that far off from reality. While driving normally and with the A/C turned on we can easily get a real-world range of about 110–120km (68–75miles), with the A/C turned off and more eco-driving the range would probably be exactly the same as the car predicts. I should mention, that we don’t usually drive it very carefully. Even with its not-that-powerful 80kW motor, it has quite a punch.
Even with its short range and with the lack of good charging infrastructure, we managed to get everywhere we needed to go. The lowest we have ever got was when I forgot to charge it, and I had to go to the city, 60km (37miles) away. I arrived at the charging station with only 6% left. Not a big deal. A quick charge was enough to get me safely home.
Charging times
Speaking of charging, according to the manufacturer, the car can receive as much as 50 kW through a quick charger. For comparison, modern EVs charge at about 250–350 kW. The highest we have ever got is 48kW. We found that in most cases it takes about 20 minutes to charge it up from 20 to 80%. Of course, it takes a bit longer in winter. In general, the coldest the battery gets, the longer it charges. But the cold battery isn’t as much of a problem as if the battery gets overheated.
Nissan leaf is probably the only EV on the market that doesn’t have any kind of battery cooling. Okay. It does… Batteries are air-cooled. You could probably guess now how efficient that is haha. It takes a lot of time to cool such a big mass. Battery being hot is a significant factor in battery degradation. Some studies suggest that if the battery gets hotter than 40°C, the degradation is much more rapid.
With a real-world range of about 120 km and with an air-cooled battery, it doesn't make a very good car for longer routes. We took the car once for a road trip into the mountains. The destination was about 200km from our home, and it took three quick charging stops to get there. (In total, the charges took about 30 minutes)It was pretty hot outside, and the battery almost got to a red temperature zone, which is harmful to the batteries. (Some people in forums recommend going to the car wash and spraying cold water under that car. But I just can’t imagine myself doing that. That’s kind of a waste of water) On the other side, warm batteries charge faster.
Reliability
After one year of ownership, only one thing needed to get replaced. And that was a CV joint. We replaced it at home for about 30€ (30$), and that is all. The car has all-season tires on, so there is no replacement needed yet.
Savings
And last but not least, there are savings over one year we had with the ownership. Currently, the prices for diesel or gasoline are growing rapidly in our country. It almost hit a mark of 2€ per litre. On the other hand, the electricity prices for homes are pretty stable. Currently, we pay about 17 cents per kWh of electricity. With a car’s average consumption of 13,9kWh per 100 km, it costs us only about 2,40€ to travel 100km (62 miles), the comparable ICE car would cost us about 11,90€ per 100km. So there is a significant difference in driving costs.
To sum it up, we have driven about 20 000 km (about 12 500miles) in the last year. Let’s assume all of the charging has been done at home. (We are happy to have some free charging stations nearby when we travel, but on the other hand, we sometimes use other stations, that are much more expensive than home charging. So I figured that I’m going to stick to 17 cents per kWh). The 20 000km of driving cost us about 473€ a comparable ICE car would cost us about 2380€ to drive the same distance. That is 1907€ of savings just on the fuel over one year!
And this is just a quick look into life with a cheap electric vehicle. It has been a great experience so far, and we didn’t regret once that we bought the car!
If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below I will try to answer them. Thank you for reading.
