Went on business travel to CA this month and decided to try driving a Tesla to see what it was like. Big mistake… coming home to my civic is painful. Coworkers told me a lot of my gripes like lack of buttons wear off after a month or so. I was already all in on electric for when my car eventually died but god, idk how long I will be able to stay ICE. Anyone else have similar experiences on test drives?
So how long did it take for you to get over range anxiety? I mean realistically, my commute is about 25 miles, but I gotta factor in range for things like grocery store runs, degradation, etc. While I’m excited about the possibilities of the AZE0 Leaf battery tech going open source, I am concerned about the CHAdeMO port being phased out
We have the perfect use case for a Leaf: 90% of our driving is around town under 70 km/h (45 mph) , and we can easily charge overnight at home. So we never had much range anxiety to begin with. Every now and then we will purposefully take it on a longer trip just so we can learn how things like speed and temperature affect the range. But for our daily driving we don’t even think about range.
I think the best thing you could do for yourself if you’re considering a Leaf is test drive one. Take it on the highway for 15 minutes and get a feel for how quickly the range drops. Find a public charger and see how much range it adds in 5-10 minutes. The Leaf may be perfect for me, but I’m just a stranger on the internet who (probably) does very different types of driving to you.