Electric car thoughts after 4 months & 11.5k miles with my Leaf

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 21:22:41 GMT

(Brushes dust off this account). Hey, a long-form blog entry! It’s been a while since I had something extensive to write up.

Now that I’ve been driving my Nissan Leaf for about 4 months and 11,500 miles, I have a few thoughts about it. Overall, I’m definitely happy with it, though there are a few things I’d look to change in a future car. But it’s a lot more fun to drive than my previous cars, and is the least expensive car I’ve owned (adjusting for inflation) since buying my first car (an old Saturn) 20 years ago. (I’m not counting Kay’s Leaf in that, which was less expensive, but also has been primarily their car the whole time we’ve owned it, with me occasionally driving.)
1) I love the acceleration and general responsiveness of the Leaf, it’s much better than the previous cars I’ve had as my primary vehicles. My first car was a Saturn, then a Prius, and most recently, a Prius-C. All good cars, but slow enough to accelerate that short freeway on-ramps were always a bit nerve-wracking. (Davis Street in Vacaville, I’m looking at you.) This car, there’s no worry about whether I’ll be able to get up to speed in time.

2) The one-pedal driving (called e-pedal on this Leaf) was surprisingly easy to adjust to, and I’ve become a convert much faster than I expected. When I drove the Leaf home from the South Bay after buying it, I turned that off partway through the trip because I found it too odd feeling for comfort, but have switched to keeping it on after my first week trying it on my daily commute. Now it feels strange to drive a car without it, which I notice every time I drive Kay’s 2013 Leaf around town. For those who haven’t driven a car with this, what it does is basically switch the default for the vehicle from moving forward slowly when not interacting with any pedals to a “default to stopped” mode. So unless you have some pressure on the accelerator, the car brakes to a stop, and stays stopped until you apply pressure again. This means not needing to press down on anything to stay stopped at a stoplight, and means that I rarely need to touch the brake pedal to adjust my speed while driving, just relax the pressure on the accelerator a bit, which I find more comfortable overall.

3) Dash controls: I’ve learned a few things with this car about how I prefer the dashboard/steering wheel controls to operate. One is that it’s startling how big a difference the climate control style has on my level of annoyance with the system. I grew up on cars with a dial for fan speed and another for the thermostat, but then drove Priuses, which replaced the fan speed dial with an up/down button. I found the button hard to reach for and locate, and ended up keeping the system in “auto” and using the temperature +/- button on the steering wheel to adjust how fast the fans were blowing, but was never happy with that. This Leaf goes back to those both being dials, and I find that enough easier to adjust without taking my attention off the road that I think that’s actually going to be a must-have feature for cars I buy from now on.

4) Battery capacity: This Leaf has just enough real-world capacity to reliably get me to work and back (approximately 102 miles) without stopping to charge, which is a little lower than I’d planned on getting when switching to an EV, but the price was too good to pass up. And overall, it works fine for my daily use, except for the occasional time that I forget to plug it in to charge at night. But I’m still happier not having to think about when I’ll be working in a stop for gas to my weekly schedule. For longer trips, it’s workable, but definitely limiting – I’d put 120 miles as the maximum distance I’d try to go between charging stops, and the fast charging takes about an hour to charge the first two times you do it. On our last trip, we found that a third fast charge in a day takes about 1 hour 40 minutes, which means I wouldn’t plan a trip that’s more than about 300-ish miles a day. Or 200 if I’m driving to work and back before we leave.

I think my ideal capacity would be about half again what this one has, since that would give enough reserve for me to make it in to work without charging until heading home if I forget to plug in, and would mean that some of our regular Bay Area trips could be done without a charging stop.

5) This takes me to my one major rant, which is that the estimated distance you can go on a charge is completely useless on this car. It claims a max of somewhere between 145-165 miles on a full charge, depending on the day, but the real range is about 75% of that. It theoretically calibrates that based on how well you drive, but since I drive a very consistent round trip and it remains that inaccurate, it’s clear that that calculation isn’t based in reality. I get why Nissan (and other carmakers from what I’ve heard) has an incentive to claim a higher range, but it’s really annoying to not have an accurate estimate – I’d rather not get one at all than get an overestimate of how far I can go.

6) Carplay: My one aftermarket addition to the car was to replace the factory stereo with one that supports Apple CarPlay, and which I could mount with a floating display that’s positioned up towards the top of the center dash, where I can more easily glance at it without pulling too much attention from the road. Having used it for a bit, that’s also now on my list as a must-have feature for future vehicles- either CarPlay built in, or a stereo that’s not so integrated into the car’s controls that it can’t be replaced with an aftermarket unit that does. As it is, this model of Leaf does have a dashboard clock that can’t be set without the factory stereo head unit, unlike Kay’s 2013 model, which let you set the clock through the instrument panel, so I have to keep the old stereo around for the time changes.

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Dusting off this account with a coffee project

Sat, 20 May 2023 17:02:13 GMT

Testing this place again with a post from my weekend project, though the lack of support for photo uploads makes these less clear here.

One of last weekend’s projects was building the enclosure for an upgrade to my vacuum pump for making my vacuum-extracted cold brew ultracoffee. I found a “quiet vacuum pump” component online for under $30, and decided to test it. On my setup, it gets down to a vacuum pressure of -25 in hg, which is about 2.5x what my previous inexpensive pump could manage without hand-pumping, and is about what the ones I use for filtration at work can pull. The downside is that as sold, it was very loud, so I put together a case for it aimed at muffling the sound, and got it down to something close to the noise level of the glorified aquarium pump that I’d been using before this.

Since I have a stash of random wood and electronics on hand, all I had to buy was the cooling fan and vibration mats underneath, making my cost for the whole thing come to around $60. Not bad at all since the ones I use at work to get this level of vacuum are in the $600 range, and are very loud. This probably has a much shorter overall lifespan on the pump, but at $30 to replace that part, that’s more than acceptable.

That makes a single stage extraction where I add all the grounds at once much more doable, instead of the three-stage one I’d been doing - the higher the ratio of grounds to water, the more work it is to pull that water back out, unless you want to throw out a lot of your potential coffee with the damp grounds. Eventually, I’ll also want to upgrade the filtration glassware to something with a wider mouth and larger filtration surface area, but that’s a significantly more expensive upgrade. Lab glassware is always pricey, and you don’t want to get used labware for working with food, you never know what residues might be on it.

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professionalhenchman

Electric car thoughts after 4 months & 11.5k miles with my Leaf

Dusting off this account with a coffee project