A Year and a Half With a Nissan Leaf (Part 1): The Acquisition
sam-koblenski.blogspot.com
sam-koblenski.blogspot.com
A couple weeks ago, after months of research, I decided to buy a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon. I went to my local Jeep dealer and took a test drive. The sales guy was fine. It's always kind of annoying when you know more about the vehicle than the person assisting you, but this is mostly par for the course, and he was polite enough. So then we get back to the dealership and it's instantly good cop/bad cop time.
I was accosted by a close talker with a fake tan and gold jewelry giving me a hard sell and telling me that he could definitely work something out for me today, while the other guy apologized for him interrupting us. This is a $40,000 vehicle. It's not an impulsive purchase and I was there for a test drive, which they knew. There was zero chance of me buying a car that day for circumstances that had nothing to do with me or them.
Anyway, it was a stereotypical scene from there. After 10 minutes of being polite, but firm. I had to physically walk out of the place while they were still talking to me, trying to make a sale. I felt rude, but what else could I have done. I'd still be there if I hadn't.
How is this good business? It must be, because I've purchased 5 vehicles (different brands, different geographic areas) in my life and this experience has been about the same for 4 of them. The 5th was a great experience I had with a VW salesman. Even so, his finance guy was rude and tried to screw me over with nonsensical add-ons and a hidden fee that he himself was "surprised" to see in the paperwork when I pointed them out. WTF? The conversation was also full of obsequious fawning BS like, "Wow, I've never seen one go for this low before!" It was very strange.
I've been following the Tesla fight against the regulatory capture that car dealerships have implemented. I hope the dealers get buried. Why can't I go online and order the Jeep (or whatever else) I want and have it delivered or pick it up from a non-jackass?
Anyway. I'll be buying a used, low mileage Jeep from Carmax. They have fixed pricing and I can view their entire nationwide inventory in detail on their websites. I wish the car manufacturers would get with it. (This is not an ad for Carmax. They are the least of many evils in this situation.)
Chrysler/Jeep/Dodge: Horrendous. I have never found a dealership I like in this chain.
Nissan: Hit or miss. One dealership was fantastic (San Diego) and one I went to was the awful "hard sell" place.
Mazda: Every one I've been to has been good save for one (unfortunately, that one is the closest to where I now live in Austin, TX.) If you live in Austin and want a Mazda, go to the dealership on the south side. They will literally throw you the keys and let you test-drive any of their cars.
Acura: Good overall, though have not been impressed with the salespeople themselves.
BMW/Mini, Lexus, Mercedes/Smart, Porsche: Have always had good experiences with these dealerships. One caveat: My fiance has a BMW and we bought it certified used, and it didn't come with a manual. A year later, despite multiple requests, we still don't have a manual. The sales experience was good, however.
Of all of the above, Lexus has been the most consistently awesome. I've been to 4 different dealerships and all were extremely pleasant.
Of note: Two dealerships have offered me jobs as a car saleswoman after I negotiated with them for friends.
VW - I won't touch, last time I was in one I was told "we don't have time to deal with you today" when there was nobody else in the dealership.
GM - Wouldn't talk to me until they ran a credit check. Afterwards were very pushy about me buying the car that day.
Subaru - Was hesitant to talk to me until they'd determined I COULD afford the car.
Honda - poor kid knew nothing about cars. No, when someone says "I drive a Mini, I'm looking for something small but not quite as small" you don't suggest an Accord.
The car itself on the other hand... a little bit of buyer's remorse.
* Wanted to buy a Ford Boss 302 Mustang. $43,000 MSRP car advertised as track-ready. Dealer said he wanted to mark up the car $25,000, and required that $25,000 as a deposit. I said for that kind of money I'd buy a Porsche Boxster S, and walked out. I found the experience similar at other dealerships.
* Got some calls the next year about the Boss 302. They were willing to sell them at MSRP. I can test drive it right? Nope. How about with a $20,000 refundable security deposit to show I have the cash -- can I drive it then? Nope. I told them I'm not buying a car that will see track duty unless I can drive it. Again, said I'd buy a Porsche.
* Went to Porsche dealerships. Interested in a Boxster S? Well, let's take out a Boxster first to see if that might be enough power, since it'd save you money. Not enough torque? Awesome, let's go wring the neck of a Boxster S _for an hour_. You like it? Fantastic. Hey, here's some free lunch. Not looking to purchase today? No problem, you come back in February when you have the down payment you want saved up and we'll get an order going for you. We'll mail you some goodies too.
Needless to say, dealer gets my deposit ($5K, same as it'd be for a 911 Turbo S) in February to start the order.
Call my local Honda dealer to find out if they have the 2013 6MT in stock. "No but we have a 2012." I'm not interested in the 2012 model because the 13s have a better battery and electric motor--more HP and torque on a fairly underpowered car. They have no interest in finding one or ordering it.
I understand that it is a new model and they don't have anything in stock yet but a complete disinterest in working with a new customer can't be good for a business. I went online and a week or so later found the car that I was looking for though I had to drive 30 miles to get it. A month later the original dealer calls back to find out if I want to buy a car. Stupid approach to business.
As an aside, the dealers with the higher echelon cars that I've been to, even just wandering around, seem to be more awesome people. I'm especially talking about audi (used), bmw (new and used), Lamborghini (new)). Even the Subaru dealer I went to with clear motive to just test drive was very polite. Direct, but polite, and that's all I could ask for.
Audi and BMW have specifically treated me like a piece of crap every time I've stepped into their showroom (maybe three times each) for the past 15 years. Nowadays I don't set foot in either because they no longer sell cars I'm interested in (R8 a bit too dear for my budget).
So I sit down in the finance room and as he's printing out the "long sheet" I just look him in the eye and say "No" before he even says anything. He'll laugh again but then he'll go through it really fast for you. I have done this countless times and it always works well.
P.S. Never buy an extended warranty. Invest that money instead and use it if you need to buy parts later. They are a ripoff and the finance guys know it. If you do feel a great need to give the dealership extra money, know this: The fees, like everything else, are negotiable.
I went with the dealership charges. Oil changes were US$20-25 and they top off all fluids and tires and give you a free car wash. I can't remember the other maintenance costs off hand, but they came really close to the US$650 for the extended warranty.
True, you can't go to Amazon Cars or equivalent, but there are options. Have you tried the internet sales department? Edmund's called it "a valuable time- and money-saver."[1]
> I wish the car manufacturers would get with it.
It's not like they haven't tried to make the buying experience more pleasant. Saturn was doing no-haggle pricing as early as 1990[2]. Scion is doing it today[3]. Gut feel is that the buying experience just isn't that important to most people with durable goods. The car is what brings us into dealerships, not the sales staff.
[1]: http://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/how-to-get-an-internet-pri...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Corporation#1990.E2.80....
I just ordered 3 kindles. I'm pretty sure i will go trhu the hassle of returning 2. but i couldn't see them in person anywhere!
the amazon model is perfect for 'permanent' items. such as book and commodity electronics.
I bet my right arm that you wouldn't ever buy a car from amazon if you couldn't test drive it at the local shoddy dealer.
You've made it clear you're a person who requires extensive test-driving. Amazon's cell phone business doesn't seem to be hurting. I've ordered my last two cell phones online sight-unseen. Same for recent laptops and a Nook. I'll take the uncertainty of holding a modern device over the sales staff.
> I bet my right arm that you wouldn't ever buy a car from amazon if you couldn't test drive it at the local shoddy dealer.
The average car age in the US is now 11.4 years old[1]. My car will likely be 15 before I get another one. In VW's terms, that's at least three generations of progress. I'm buying a car for a decade, and none of the problems that come up in a decade will be revealed by a test drive.
Regardless, I merely agreed it wasn't currently an option and the parent may have a better experience with the internet sales department of his or her local dealerships.
[1]: http://www.edmunds.com/car-news/average-age-of-cars-in-us-ju...
What country are you in? In the US, you can see Kindle at any Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Staples, OfficeMax and several other national retailers that cover most of the country.
Hell will freeze before a DX is on display it seems.
In this case, he clearly was very enthusiastic about buying a Leaf. That's the kind of customer you want for a new product. How many others like him weren't even within 100 mile radius of any eligible dealers?
If Nissan had a process to bump such customers up to a person who handled such purchases as a kind of promotion, who could get a Leaf prepped at a vetted dealer and then flat-bedded to the customer, maybe the goodwill and PR opportunities would have helped them reach their sales targets.
http://www.thedetroitbureau.com/2012/11/nissan-will-miss-lea...
Now it's not really an issue. We've got two dealerships in the city, and they're both selling 2-4 Leafs per month. I just couldn't wait for mine.
It doesn't make economical sense to pay 7K more for a car who's primary feature is low cost per mile, then hardly put miles on the car. Maybe that's just me.
I mean, if you look at what's on the road, you'll see a lot of cars that are more expensive than what could do the same job. Some people even pay extra for fancy wheels, sunroofs, bigger engines (which cost more in fuel), cosmetic modifications, etc.
So either we need to judge all vehicles purely on economics, or we should admit that car buyers are looking for other things than purely functional transportation at the lowest cost.
Oh and each model of vehicle has a target demographic, and you may notice the marketing of any given model targets the lifestyle of the buyer. Young, hip and urban? Hard-working man's man? Eco-concious? A car for every lifestyle.
For instance, I had a Prius and put 120K miles on it in 5 years. If I recall correctly, compared to a similarly outfitted Camry, I saved thousands in TCO in 5 years.
This is in the economy car class, which means people are usually looking for economy. If it were a sports car, we'd maximize for performance.
Anyway, it's true that it would take me ~20 years to break even with the 2012 Leaf, but I wasn't optimizing for economy. I was optimizing for the environment.
Tesla's selling all the electric cars they're making, certainly not only because the people who buy them are saving money on gas.
Of course! But it's the assumption that is made. It's good to remember to check the assumptions people are making.
A $1000 Craigslist beater or a $20/month bus pass can probably do that commute.
I can't see anyone buying a Nissan Leaf as their only car. The range is a big inconvenience.
I am curious to see how the battery will handle the cold winters in the long term.
As for the winters, the first one was pretty mild, but the second one had some dips below zero. During the cold snaps the battery definitely lost significant range, but now that it's summer, the range is practically back to its original amount. There's been very slight degradation of battery capacity so far. I've got plenty of data that I plan to analyze in a future post, but that's for a future post.
Remember that for some, it's no problem. I live in the UK, I have no intention of ever driving more than 100 miles in one go, and if I really need to travel long distances, trains, buses, trams, planes are relatively cheap and available.
I doubt a Leaf is what I would buy, but given that Tesla want to allow free charging, so ostensibly free fuel, I can see that as very attractive in the near future.
I wouldn't do it, you wouldn't do it, but I wouldn't say that nobody would do it.
For people who do want to drive long distances, but not frequently, it could still be a good way to go. Cars are pretty easy to rent, whether from a place like Zipcar or a more traditional rental company like Enterprise. If you drive long distances rarely, it could easily be a win to buy something like a Leaf, then rent on the rare occasions you need more.
I find that people often try to imagine every possible eventuality when buying a car, and want to buy something that's capable of it all, no matter how rare these things are required. Well, they say, this car is perfect for our daily needs, but when the sister and parents come to visit once every two years, they won't fit, so we need something bigger. Or, it's perfect, except it won't handle that road trip we've always been dreaming of but never got around to doing. Buying for typical needs and renting for atypical needs is usually cheaper.
The battery has a heating system to combat cold weather.
It's unfortunate that Nissan did so poorly with the deployment of the initial Leafs. I love ours, and would buy another one, except that every aspect of the buying experience has put me off ever buying another Nissan ever again. I'll repeat: I'll never buy another Nissan.
Pre-ordering one was easy enough. After that, the experience went downhill. There were some production delays due to the tsunami, but they were going to have delays anyway, tsunami or not. I'll let that slide, it's a radically different car, things didn't go as planned; whatever. Finally the cars are being delivered. Months go by, and despite having pre-ordered on the first day, no Leaf in my driveway. Then I find out via online forums that people who ordered months after I did are picking up their car. That's completely unacceptable, but whatever, it's just a car.
Eighteen months after I entered the initial pre-order, the car arrives and we're off to the dealership. That was probably the final straw for any future Nissan purchases. Despite having arranged a time to pick it up, and having waited eighteen months for the car, we shake hands with the salesman and...wait. After nearly an hour of standing around the dealership drooling over the GT, we are finally deemed worthy of the privilege of receiving the car. After the usual BS with the finance guy, we drive off.
I'll reiterate that the car itself is great. It exceeded expectations, and after two years and 16K miles we've had zero trouble with it. But I'm not going to purchase another car from a company that fails at every step to delivery.
For me, the only useful advantage is slightly reducing the dependence on the middle east, but the number of EVs on the road vs everything else makes even that so infinitesimally small it's not worth bothering.
We actually get more oil from Canada than from the Middle East[1]. We do import the most from all of OPEC combined, but OPEC includes places like Venezuela, from where we get an awful lot of oil, Ecuador, Nigeria, and other countries that aren't in the Middle East.
Sorry for being a pedant.
I had thought that the leaf combined with a all wheel drive vehicle would be perfect for our situation. We live in an area that gets snow in winter and close to the mountains, so AWD would be ideal. The leaf would be great for the day-to-day, which usually involves < 20 miles or driving.
We too have an aging corolla, which is a fantastic car for the $$$ and the gas mileage.
I was intent on buying a Leaf, and I wasn't going to let this initial ordeal sour my opinion of the car because it had more to do with the dealership. I knew going into it that getting the car back to Madison was going to be a stretch, and then events conspired to make it a bit more difficult. I think the fact that I made it back in spite of that was actually a point in the Leaf's favor.
Not necessarily only the shortcomings, I was thinking critical as in "analytical", I would have love to read about how the EV experience translated driving out of the dealership for example. It may not be new to you but I've never driven one and would have "extracted value" out of your post if you did describe it ;-)
Most 2013s (all except for the base model) also come with a heat pump instead of a resistive heater, so efficiency of the forced air heater has also improved relative to earlier models (and relative to other similar cars).
For people who live in a mild climate, (sf bay area for me), temporary battery capacity loss due to cold weather, or permanent battery damage due to excessively high ambient temperatures, are not an issue, and given the plethora of chargers in this area, I'd say that almost 100% of the driving my family does outside the daily commute (my wife and I drive separately, and we only have one Leaf), is done with the Leaf. I was skeptical about the car initially, but the leases are inexpensive enough not to worry about and it's been a pleasant surprise.