Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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Look into the Nissan Leaf, one of the early EV models. I don't know what the 2026 is like but my 2021 has 220-ish miles of range and is... an electric car.

It's a car. That's electric.

Physical buttons. Normal doors. Normal design. Normal handles. Normal controls. Drives great and accelerates better than an economy gas car.

As a bonus, that means almost the entire car is standard. Other than the electric drive train, a regular mechanic can work on everything else: tires, wheels, brakes, suspension, etc.

It's given us basically zero problems. Maintenance so far is a few minor recall items (free fixes) and a tire rotation. We bought it new during COVID.

Only downside to the 2021 model was the CHaDemO (or however you caps it) plug, which is obsolescent. I think recent models have CCS. There is a converter dongle and if I fast charged often I'd pick one up. Apparently they work but they're a little pricey since unfortunately it's not just a simple plug converter. It's a different signaling and locking system, so it has to be a smart dongle.

The Leaf is massively underrated IMO.

The 2026 Leaf made some big improvements. Liquid cooled battery, faster charging, longer range.

It has the usual modern car cost cutting where steering wheel inputs are plastic panels with mysterious capacitive regions and no feedback so you can't feel if you've successfully pressed anything, whether you pressed the right thing, or if your fingertips are too dry and don't register. Most of the center console inputs are replaced with a screen with another row of cheap capacitive touch icons below it.

Charging is behind the times again with an awkward 2-port arrangement, but it's different from the previous gen's J1772 L1/L2 and CHAdeMO for L3 up to 50 kW.

For 2026 they replaced the CHAdeMO port with NACS, supporting a maximum of 150 kW L3 charging, but it still uses a separate J1772 port for L1/L2 unlike every other car where the NACS port does both.

All things considered it's a solid entry level EV.

There used to be huge FUD campaigns against Leafs, and against not many others. Perhaps because Leaf at face value could have rendered entry trim Model S and Model 3 pointless.

The old release really deserved that campaign. It wasn't just FUD. Between the lack of a good battery management system, meaning the batteries were the ones that died relatively quickly; and the low range, which was maybe enough to get you to work in back for most people, but it didn't leave a lot of headroom for any other errand you might run. They were a not great car.

Don't get me wrong, my brother has one and it is an okay car. It's just not great. There are a number of limitations which is why he gave it to my mom and drives a bolt. (the use value of a leaf is poor enough that it isn't worth trying to sell.)

Any other electric car is suffering from the leaf's bad reputation, and yet they don't have the problems I named.

I looked into this before getting the 2021 model. Apparently it still didn't have liquid cooling but they'd updated the battery chemistry to be more robust. So far it still holds 100% its original charge capacity after 5 years and almost 40K miles.

I live in Ohio though, so not somewhere super hot. I would have thought twice before buying that car in e.g. Phoenix or Las Vegas.

So maybe I'd add that as a caveat for older model Leafs (Leaves?). The very first models did have major problems here, but apparently the later models were fine... but I'd still be wary in super hot places.

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