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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

Americans can get a used Nissan Leaf for $10-$20k and it would accommodate virtually any daily commute plus side trips without ever spending a dollar on gas. I continue to be baffled year after year as to why more Americans don't go that route. At least those with detached homes or otherwise easy access to charging.

If nothing else, the fact that most Americans don't by a cheap EV as a second car (assuming they have need of one) is particularly baffling.

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From experience living in southern America you will get ridiculed, pummelled to the side of the road, and blinded by F350s and Silverados. And constantly told it's your fault for having a car they couldn't see over their 8 ft hood.

The Tesla dealer told me to get a paint kit when I picked up my car, a few years ago; he called it the Tesla Texas Tax. People (used to) go out of their way to ding my car.

That is INSANE to me. It's just a fucking car. What the hell is wrong with these troglodytes? What values does that represent?

The range will be like 80 miles? Many people I grew up with had jobs 40-60 miles away, and those places still don't have charging stations.

That’s an extremely long commute, so it might not be effective for them but there’s a huge percentage of the population who don’t have that problem. Roughly 9% of Americans have a commute that long, and if we got even half of the rest to switch we’d save an enormous amount of pollution and money while building out the charging infrastructure which would help the rest.

That's an absurdly long commute. Probably less than 5% of daily car commuters.

There's a reason a used Nissan Leaf is so cheap. In EVs, once the battery is done, the car is done, as replacing the battery is expensive. The more the battery is used, like any battery, the less capacity it has, the faster it drains, the lower your mile range.

The batteries in most electric vehicles will now effectively last the lifetime of the vehicle itself [0]. Like modern solar panels, it's effectively not a consideration any more.

Granted, there's a big range in the age of used Nissan Leaf's (Leaves?)

[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/heres-one-way-we-know-t...

Not Nissan Leaf batteries. The article explicitly says:

> The Nissan Leaf bears a lot of responsibility for the idea that EV batteries don't last. Nissan eschewed liquid cooling for the Leaf's pack, and the EV first went on sale in model year 2012, so there has been enough time for some early Leafs to lose up to 20 percent of their pack's storage capacity.

Apparently most EV batteries degrade to about 80% SOH and then stay there. My 2015 Leaf is on 79% having bought it in 2020 at 86%.

I've never heard of an EV battery being "done". In practice they seem to be doing better that expected.

Granted, some users need more than 80% of the original range, but for them, there's a second hand market.

Yeah that doesn't seem true based on what I'm reading. Sounds like mindless propaganda.

Maybe just read the link the other reply posted. It explicitly points out that the Nissan Leaf specifically loses far more battery capacity than the competition because of some design choices

1) new Evs are still more expensive than new gas cars 2) in some states, the registration fees are higher (+$225 in Washington State) 3) if it's your only car it may be a bit limiting, unless you are willing to rent a gas car on occasion.

Living in Las Vegas, a Leaf was the perfect daily driver. The whole valley isn't big enough to ever go beyond the range in a single day no matter how many errands or kid soccer games. Plus you could remotely turn on the A/C which is a game changer in the desert. We also had a Land Rover Discovery (LR3) for when we wanted to drive to LA or Utah or whatever else.

When you see stuff like this, its kinda off-putting. Better to wait till the teething problems are over : https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/when-a-leaf-is-a-brick...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/leaf-nissan-owners-leg...

The Nissan Leaf is not that practical. There's a reason why SUVs are the most popular type of car in the US.

> There's a reason why SUVs are the most popular type of car in the US

Not practicality for sure! The trunks of at least mid-sized SUVs are small and the trunks of mid-sized estate wagons are quite large. SUVs have a raised vehicle floor, which is terrible for driving dynamics, removes interior space, and adds air resistance.

SUVs are staggeringly stupid vehicles, but fashionable. Personally, I like some fashions, and others I ignore and avoid as hard as I can - SUVs are firmly in the latter category.

One funny side effect of pickups and SUVs being sold for suburbanite egos is that some actual tradespeople and farmers have started importing tiny Japanese kei trucks because the cargo volumes are the same or higher than a modern American vehicle.

It is staggering. I live in the UK and we have been moving in that direction. We have lots of small city style cars. But they are never big enough to easily hold a newborn baby with its stroller (ironic when you consider how tiny babies are). So parents tend to get these small SUV's and it is seen as the natural upgrade. I guess this happens again when the family grows and you start doing more DIY.

We are all hoodwinked into believing that space in a car is unusual and needs a special kind of car. When actually a well designed small car or coupe can have plenty of space. And adding an extra couple of foot to the size of the boot probably has minimal effect on the manufacturing cost. But that would break the product skews that car companies want to push.

Most people in the US live in suburbs, which means it's more efficient to carry larger loads due to larger distances. For example, bigger grocery trips since the grocery store is farther away. Bigger home sizes in the suburbs also enable larger families.

I can easily carry a week's worth of groceries (21 meals plus snacks) for my family of five in my old sedan. Even if the trunk is half full of junk just throw grocery bags in the back seat.

I even managed to fit enough lumber for three 4' by 10' by 6" raised garden beds in there, trunk to sticking out the front window. That was a little hairy though.

By far the biggest issue is fitting 3 kids in back now that they are bigger, especially if one or more are grouchy. I always take the bigger car if more than 4 people are traveling.

Yea it's possible to do it with a coupe/sedan but things are just easier and more situationally capable with a bigger car.

That's what estate cars / station wagons are for.

And that worked fine for decades (well, as long as your definition of fine includes traffic jams) using regular cars which cost and polluted considerably less. SUVs are bulky but as anyone who’s ever packed one knows they don’t have more usable cargo space unless you’re stacking stuff up to the ceiling since most of the volume is directed vertically to make them look tougher.

I notice this whenever we go to IKEA or Costco where our sub-$30k Subaru is loaded faster and with less hassle than vehicles costing twice as much.

But you can do that with a more traditional car. A coupe can have a plenty of space.

Even a small car can easily carry 4 people and a LOT of groceries. A LOT.

I thought we already understood that US large car sales was the result of the individualist culture and perceived improvements in safety from being in a heavier vehicle during a collision

It’s not any single factor but a lot of it is due to industry-friendly policies which made SUVs and trucks artificially cheap:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popu...

It’s important to remember that Japanese car manufacturers weird absolutely slaughtering U.S. companies in the 80s and 90s by making cheaper, better quality, more efficient vehicles. Detroit has a lot of political weight, however, and when they started pushing far more profitable SUVs as the ideal daily driver, nobody in Congress was going to get in the way by suggesting policies intended to help tradespeople should be modified.

That campaign in the 90s made them popular enough to cancel out decades of fuel economy and safety improvements, and effectively started an arms race where people who never go off-road started to think that they needed to pay more for one, too, because otherwise they’d be at a fatal mismatch in a crash.

A while ago I read somewhere that it was because for a long time (American) trucks were technically nit cars. And manufacturers could save money on a bunch of safety things.

Which resulted in more money for marketing.

EVs are generally very heavy compared to similarly sized vehicles.

Relatedly… a friend is looking for a power inverter for an otherwise-fine 2015 Leaf. Anyone here know where to source one?

Social signaling is important. Whether you like the game or not.

To not: In Europe, social signaling works in favor of biking… but only among a certain type of people (let’s say vegetarians). But it’s a circle of friends really hard to maintain because they also veto you if you take any non-ecologic decision.

So, long story short, social status signaling cannot be cancelled by ecologist status signaling. Seems like we’d have to appease tensions on both sides…

In Norway, there are plenty of cycling enthusiasts (for around-town transit, commuting, and exercise / fun) with all sorts of dietary approaches. I don’t think there’s any meaningful vegetarian / cycling correlation there.

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