Living With An Electric Car Changed My Mind

Hello everyone and welcome, I have a confession to make you say, you know, the first step is to admit that you have a problem, so, yeah, you know, I'm going to come out and say it. I have range anxiety. It feels good to understand it. so when my gas tank reaches a quarter tank I'll fill it up, anything less is too risky and that's part of the reason I thought I wouldn't enjoy driving an

electric

car. I thought it would give me too much anxiety because Driving an

electric

core, especially many of today's modern electric cars that have about 100 miles of range, is a lot like driving a gas car that only has a quarter tank when fully charged. full, so initially I was very anxious and thought there was no way I was going to enjoy driving an electric car and Nissan was kind enough to let me drive this 2018 Leaf for the last six months.

Now, driving an EV for the past six months hasn't cured my autonomy. anxiety, but it has completely

changed

my

mind

about how I feel about them and the biggest difference between how I felt before and how I feel now about electric cars after having driven one for a long time is that they actually already have a lot of range , even the ones with 100 miles, even this Nissan Leaf with 150 miles, I think one of the biggest things that keeps people from saying no I can't access an electric core is the range of only 150 miles, but for people who are electric.

The cars make sense for those where it is actually a logical decision to purchase one of these vehicles. 150 miles is actually much more than enough and that brings me to my unpopular opinion. I'm sure some people will have some negative feelings about this opinion, but the thing is, if you're going to buy a boring car, if you're going to go out and buy a boring car anyway, it might as well be electric and I'm going to explain why in this video and I'll talk about some of the good and bad of this Nissan Leaf and having an electric core.

What it's like to live with one for six months. And yes, I still fill my cars with gas when they reach a quarter tank. Now electric cars are a lot of fun but they are not suitable for everyone, that was bad, there are certain conditions that I think need to be met for an electric car to make sense for people, so the first is to have a garage or a place to charge that vehicle if I don't have anywhere to charge the vehicle I'm not saying that you can't get by with an electric car I'm just saying that it's going to be less convenient than having a gasoline car and in my opinion things should always move forward We should always have things that are more convenient, easier to live with, and electric cars can come in many forms, but not if you don't have a way to charge them at home.

The second thing I think you need if you're going to have an electric car is another car and now you're thinking, Jason, that's idiotic, why are you telling me it should have two cores? Wait, listen to me. I think there is some logic to this, which is why most two-person households in the world United States have two or more cars, so if there is more than one person

living

in a house, chances are that house have more than one vehicle and I think I really believe that if you're going to have more than one vehicle, one of them might be the same one.

Well go electric, these electric cars have a lot of benefits again, if you're the type of person that just wants a car to get you from A to B it will do amazing things, they're actually faster than you think most of gas. cars, it's amazing how fast these electric cars are, they have instant torque, you know they're quiet, they're smoother, there's no engine or transmission noise, you can preheat them in the winter in a closed environment, you can preheat them. cooling them in summer they are very easy to maintain, they are very economical to operate and you can start each day with a full charge.

Am I saying that if you are single and don't have a garage you should do it? You won't get an electric car, no, that's not what I'm saying. I just think it will be less convenient if you buy it currently. Yes, you can buy a Tesla and have 300 miles of range and drive across the country, but it still takes longer, you still have to charge and plug in, and charging times right now aren't as fast as they could be, so I think as a road trip vehicle, gas is currently more convenient and so I'm not going to say you should do it. get on an electric vehicle if you know you live alone at home you don't have a garage you don't have to put it in to charge it, I honestly don't think so right now, not yet, I don't think it makes sense, but I think there are a lot of people you know, a lot Families who live with two cars, or more, for their home and one of them being electric to get around the city is an incredible, incredible, incredible option, which is three incredible ones, well now that we have talked about it. conditions to have an eevee, let's talk about range anxiety because I think this is the biggest thing that holds people back, so let's do a little bit of something very simple, very easy, very fun, of course, because it's mathematics, math is fun math and So the math is that the average American drives about 12,000 miles a year if you divide it by 365, that's the number of days in a year that gives you about 33 miles a day.

Any electric vehicle can achieve it. 33 miles, meaning the average American's needs can be met with an electric car. I'm not saying you have to go on these crazy road trips with them. I'm saying that your daily commute can be satisfied with an electric car every day. You get home from work you plug in your car every morning you get in your car you have a full charge you can do absolutely anything in the city you know how to get anywhere you need to plug it back in and you wake up the next What day do you know?

You have a full charge again. You will never have to go to a gas station. Your car is always full every morning. That's something really beautiful about electric cars and I think it's actually more convenient. It takes 10 seconds to plug it in. and you have a full tank and a charged battery every morning, now there are actually many advantages of driving an electric car, especially in an urban environment where the maximum speeds are not very high, now of course you know that most of us we are. We never reach the maximum speeds of our vehicles anyway, we all obey traffic laws, so you know, in urban environments where you can't go that fast, regardless of these things being very fast because up to about 40 to 50 miles per hour these things have incredibly good acceleration, they have all that maximum torque available from zero rpm and it's available instantly when you put your foot down, so they're very quick, especially at low speeds, then as you get to those Higher speeds, the power begins to decrease.

The torque starts to decrease with it and as a result you know that at low speeds in urban environments, weaving in and out of traffic, these things are really fun, very fast, it's easy to merge into traffic when you know you only have a small gap, It's easy to go through that yellow light because you get that instant torque the moment you put your foot down, you go back through that yellow light obeying all the traffic laws as you do it, but in an urban environment it really is difficult to beat how fun the cars are. electric cars because you don't take crazy corners, you just accelerate and then stop again and accelerate and stop again, and that's what electric vehicles really do super well, they're very fast, they have a lot of punch.

I got instant feedback and it's a lot of fun to drive in an urban environment. Oh hey, you wanted to do a little more math, so one of the questions a lot of friends asked me about this vehicle is: I noticed my electric bill has gone up since I've been driving it and the answer is no, so let's do some simple calculations to understand why. This car has a 40 kilowatt hour battery and here in Idaho it costs 8 cents for every kilowatt hour you use now if we assume a charging efficiency of only 80 percent and in fact I have seen studies that say the Nissan Leaf can have charge efficiencies greater than 90 percent, so we're going with a conservative 80 percent. so we have a 40 kilowatt hour battery pack, we divide that by 80 percent efficiency, which means we need 50 kilowatt hours to charge this.

Every kilowatt hour costs eight cents, fifty times eight cents, which gives us four dollars, four dollars to fully charge this vehicle, which is about as much as a gallon of gasoline in some cities, and actually drive an electric core the same. distance than a gasoline one will typically cost you about a third more and that makes sense because electric cars are about three times more efficient than gasoline cars at getting from one place to another as a quick example, if you had a gasoline core that had a 5 gallon tank, 30 miles per gallon, that's 150 miles of range, like this sheet to fill that 5 gallon tank, let's say gas costs 3 dollars. a gallon, that's 15 in front of me, you know, four dollars to fill this up, the national average for the US would be about six dollars to fully charge this nissan leaf, but you're thinking Jason electric cars are too much Expensive, I can't afford one.

I'm not going to buy one, they cost too much and I'm not going to argue against you, they are expensive, but here's something to think about: the average purchase price of a new car in January 2018, according to Kelly Blue Book, was more than 36,000. the average purchase price of a new car and there are many electric cars that you can buy for less than thirty-six thousand dollars, even a maxed out honda civic, a basic honda civic, I'm not talking about the yes or the type r, a honda civic to the max. it can go up to thirty thousand dollars, so people are spending a lot of money on cars and you know that a base maxed out Honda Civic isn't going to be as fast, it's not going to be as fun, electric cars are going to be better and they're still going to work.

For only 30 grand, there are plenty of options in the 30 grand range, so you know electric cars are expensive, but they're not unreasonably priced considering what you get, and they continue to get better for what you pay. , so you know, seven years. Ago this Nissan Leaf had about half the range, it had less power, it had less torque and yet seven years later it's exactly the same price and it has almost double the range, more torque, more power, that's great , how quickly things are improving with electric cars now again. The topic of the expense of these electric cars I want to talk about luxury cars because luxury cars want to be really quiet, so they try to reduce engine noise as much as possible.

They want to be smooth in their acceleration, so they don't want to. They want you to feel the transmission shift, they want it to be a nice smooth acceleration, they want it to be quiet inside the cabin and these are all things that electric cars do very well even at affordable prices compared to luxury vehicles, so You already know the electric motor. It has instant torque, it is a very smooth power, there are no changes, so it accelerates with a single speed and they are very quiet, you do not hear the engine noise like that of a combustion engine.

Electric motors are much quieter, which is why driving these vehicles. It's very quiet and hits many of the key marks that luxury vehicles are trying to achieve. Now the last point about electric cars being expensive is that used electric cars are incredibly cheap, these things, for better or worse, a lot of these cars depreciate like crazy, but that means you can buy a fairly new one that has a lot of warranty left for a very reasonable price. I started searching. You can buy a 2015 Nissan Leaf with only 30,000 miles, which means you have plenty of miles left. on the battery warranty many years left on the battery warranty these things come with eight year battery warranties and you get into a car for ten grand 2015 30,000 miles 10 grand I've seen a lot of them online You can buy these electric used cars for BMW i3 crazy cheap, that thing drops like crazy a third of its price after three years, from 45,000 to 15,000 in just a few years, so it looks like it's not a such a smart investment from the beginning. but if you buy a used one, you can save a lot of money on these cars, while the demand is relatively low and the technology is still improving quite fast, so now I want to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of this particular vehicle, the nissan leaf 2018.

I've been

living

with this as mentioned for six months, so I've formed a lot of opinions on what I like and don't like, so I started with the positive things, what I like the most. thisvehicle is the acceleration and the instant torque is quite addictive it's great you put the pedal to the metal they actually put you back in your seat you know you look at this car from the outside you don't think too much about anything, it's not going to work be that fast and, even so, you'll probably win almost every traffic light race and you'll probably make it, you know, every yellow light obeys those traffic laws again, it's also very quiet and that's good, you know, having conversations in this.

The nice thing about driving around town is being able to talk to your passengers without really hearing any noise. You know you hear some noise from the electric motor, but you don't actually get the same amount of noise as you would with a combustion vehicle. quite quiet inside, it's also very smooth, you know there's no gear changes, so you accelerate, it's very smooth, you accelerate, very smoothly, you decelerate using that regeneration and you know you get used to that smoothness and then you get into a vehicle combustion again, you have that abruptness. The gear shifts, which yes, in their own way are cool and when you're in the right vehicle, it's definitely fun, but when you're in a car and you're trying to get from one place to another, that smoothness really starts to really appreciate it, It is also a very easy vehicle to drive.

One of the things I particularly like is one-pedal driving, which is why Nissan calls it an electronic pedal and that's why you can accelerate and decelerate using just the accelerator pedal now in emergencies. Of course, you can press the brake pedal. It still works as usual, but you can use that one pedal to drive everything. It will decelerate to 0.2 gs, which I thought was enough to stop you from reaching a traffic light or a stop sign things like that and it's very predictable it's easy to get used to you know how much you have to put your foot down how much you have to let go to stop at the desired place I also like it the gamification of the core and the information that is displayed on the screen so you can see, you know what things you are doing and how that affects your range and it will actually change your range depending on what settings you have the weather on if you have a echo. mode or normal mode, you know things like that, it will actually change it and when you recharge the car it will give you an estimated range based on your previous driving, so the more economically you've driven, the longer your range will be when you get in the car and you're fully charged.

I also like that it looks like a normal car. You know, the previous sheet looked weird, peculiar, uh, ugly in my opinion, and this seems pretty normal. It's also very practical, so you know the rear cargo space. 40 More cargo space behind the rear seats than the Chevy Bolt, of course the Chevy Bolt can go much further than the Nissan Leaf, but I find it to be a much more usable and useful vehicle. You have more space inside to do whatever. you may need to do it and finally I think it's great that they improved the core in almost every way: range, power, torque, interior, everything has improved and yet the core is still the same base price. started in 2011.

Now the car is certainly not perfect so let's start looking at some of the things I don't like about this vehicle and my biggest complaint is probably the most insignificant but it bothers me quite a bit either way. little bit so I'm going to start and then I'm going to show you what I'm talking about and it has to do with the infotainment system. Now the Nissan Leaf has Apple Carplay, which I think is great, especially now that Apple Carplay works with Waze and Google Maps are also great for using Spotify, so we'll just press the smartphone connect button here so we can use Apple Carplay and says: Connect a compatible Android Auto or Carplay device to the USB so you can see.

I will connect to the USB and then it says reading USB memory. Now I'm connected to the device, it starts playing a song from my iPod and then if I press smartphone connection, obviously I want to use Apple Carplay, so I press smartphone connection and now it says start. Apple Carplay, disconnect and reconnect the device, so I have to do it every time I want to use Apple Carplay. Disconnect, reconnect the device, then it says it is starting Apple Carplay and finally I can enter Apple Carplay. Use Google Maps, Spotify, Waze, anything but all of them. every time you use it you have to unplug it again, plug that plug back in and I don't understand why you can't just turn on the car, plug it into your phone and it automatically allows you to use Apple CarPlay like many others.

There are other vehicles out there, so my biggest frustration here with the Leaf is that every time you have to unplug and replug to be able to use Apple Carplay, another thing I don't like is the way the brake pedal feels. when you do it. I'm using the e-pedal, so I really like using the e-pedal and just driving with one pedal, but occasionally you need to use the brakes, so when you use the brakes using that e-pedal there's a little bit of death. zone, so as you get into it a little bit, nothing changes, you don't feel any braking even though you're starting to press the brake pedal and then once you get past that initial depression in that brake pedal you start a has some braking force, some additional braking force over the braking force of the e-pedals, so it gives you this strange, unnatural feeling when you use the e-pedal and you use the brakes, the brakes themselves, it feels a little unnatural to do it now if you turn off the electronic pedal and just use the brakes normally, they feel normal, they have no dead zone when you initially start to press them, they feel very good, you don't have this transition between mechanical or regeneration, but when you are using the e-pedal that's when you notice it and there's a little dead zone and it feels a little strange to step on that brake pedal.

I'm also not a big fan of Nissan's Pro Pilot Assist, so this is their adaptive cruise control system and the reason I'm not a big fan is that it seems overly cautious and a little aggressive on the brakes, So, for example, if the car in front of you turns right, you know what speed you should be going. and then you can pass by them after they make that turn with a professional driver, it brakes very aggressively once that person starts slowing down for that turn and then you get to a very low speed and then the car behind you He gets mad at you because you are slowing down a lot for no reason, I don't like that, he seems too cautious, too aggressive with the brakes, I have also been sent warnings and also with audible warnings that I am going to hit. the car in front of me when I'm clearly not going to do it so I stop at a red light and you know I'm going to use the electronic pedal to brake and I know I'm fine, I'll have my foot on the brake pedal, I know I have a lot of space between me and the car in front of me and it will start flashing and tell me I'm going to have a collision, which will make you panic.

When you know there's no reason to panic, you're actually stopping with a lot of distance between you and the car in front of you. I also wish the car offered telescopic steering. This is the sv. It's the mid-level Nissan Leaf and you can. move the steering wheel up and down, but you can't move it in or out, so you know, I wish I could move the steering wheel a little closer, but unfortunately there's only one setting for the steering wheel, you can put it all the way up, which It's good, I have a lot of room for my knees.

That being said, I wish I could move the steering wheel a little closer. One last disadvantage regarding the Nissan Leaf is that the battery is air cooled, so Vehicles like the Chevy Bolt Tesla use liquid cooling for the battery and this allows it to keep them in a much tighter range and that is where the Batteries like to be in a very specific temperature range when they get colder or hotter. On top of that, they become very unhappy and there may be further battery degradation. Now Nissan has made changes to the blade and battery over the years to improve this, but it still uses air cooling and I think there is an inherent advantage to liquid cooling and part.

From what makes me think it's your owner's manual, you know they give you some tips on things you should do to maintain the life of the lithium ion battery. An example is that they say they allow the vehicle and the lithium ion battery. the battery to cool down after use before charging, in other words they say when you get home from work don't plug it in immediately and I think that's a little crazy, you should have a cooling system that can control the temperature of the battery . plug it in, you get in, you don't worry about it, so I think it's unreasonable to assume that the consumer should do something where they have to go back to the garage, get back in their car, and plug it in later after it's cooled everything down again, like I mentioned above, it should always be more convenient, not less convenient.

It also says to use normal charge or trickle charge and minimize the use of public fast charging or fast chargers, so you know, think about not plugging it in immediately after use. so not using fast chargers, basically what that says is if you don't want to know, degrade the life of your battery, how long it lasts and again, it comes with an eight year hundred thousand mile warranty, so don't It's something I have to think about. for a long time if you're going to buy one of these new, um, but basically that means you don't know, take road trips because road trips will degrade the life of the battery, so you know you shouldn't charge it right away. after use and you shouldn't be using fast charging and you're doing both if you're going on a road trip so for me it's a little disappointing to see, I think it would be great if they had liquid cooling and you could use the cooling system even when the core is off to make sure the battery doesn't get too hot or cold to prevent long term battery degradation, to sum this all up if you live in a multi car household. and you have a place to charge an electric car, I can't imagine why you wouldn't want a second car to be electric, they have so many interesting advantages, they are very interesting, am I saying that personally? get rid of all my gas cars no, im stubborn, i think the noise is amazing and i like my gas course, but i'm going to buy an electric core and i'm surprised that, you know, driving this thing for the last six months eased my concerns about range anxiety.

I no longer believe that an electric vehicle with a 100 mile range is inadequate, not even a little less than that, and the really good thing about this is that there are a lot of very cheap used options in that hundred. mile range uh that's great for me. I'm excited to buy a new electric vehicle to put in the garage. I think they're really fun around town, really cool, so I'm going to buy one. and I would recommend the same if you have room for it, if you need a second car, if you have a place to charge it, I think they're fantastic, so thank you all so much for looking and if you have any questions or comments.

Of course, feel free to leave the ones below.