About three weeks ago I met a car delivery man behind a local Walmart and took delivery of a silver 2011 Nissan Leaf. I bought it from a dealer in the Seattle area a week earlier.
I live in Helena, Montana, the "Queen" city of Montana. (We can claim that title because we are the capital city of the state). We're a city of about 50,000 people in a large state with robust winters and great driving distances between cities. Reactions to my decision to buy an all-electric car for my family of five have been interesting.
It's fascinating that even after saying, "all electric" people will still ask me about belts or oil changes or even gasoline consumption. Perhaps the casual listener has assumed that it's a plug-in hybrid or some kind of new Prius. Once a person asking about maintenance stopped himself mid-sentence after he realized that the all-electric Leaf wouldn't have the parts in question. The big question I usually hear is about range.
"So how far can you go on a charge?"
"Well it's for around town only and in an ideal situation you could go 100 miles. In the real world it goes 70 miles or less. It's replacing our aging second car that seldom left town."
I was well aware of the Leaf's limited range before I bought it. My decision to buy it was not based on long driving range. So why buy a car with only a 70-mile range?
I chose to buy the Leaf because an overwhelming majority of our trips are within that limited range. Probably 98 out of 100 trips are in-town. By national standards our town is small, so we never go far to get places. My children are young, so we (my wife and I) do a lot of kid-hauling trips. Having a car that covers almost all my driving needs without buying any gasoline is amazing.
The Leaf is not for the person that owns only one car...it's for the typical working family that owns two. When I travel out of town, I'll be in our Toyota Sienna, very likely with the rest of my family.
The Leaf holds three children in the backseat. Two are in boosters, one is still in a car seat. The kids are more crowded in the Leaf compared to our Sienna, but they fit.
I think the idea of owning a limited-range car in Montana freaks people out...there's no way the Leaf would work for driving between towns in this state. But that's not the idea, so why worry about it? If you can accept having an around-town-only car, life is easy. I have absolutely zero range anxiety.
No gasoline, no range anxiety, and fits the kids. That's why a bought a Nissan Leaf.
No comments:
Post a Comment