Going Electric

Come the end of this weekend — I’m very likely to be the owner of an Electric Vehicle (EV). I mentioned looking into this about this time last month. I’ve been interested in going electric for my daily-use car for some time now, but only started any serious research recently. The mistake I made — or thought I’d made — was including new cars with newer battery technology and features in the scope of that research.

After looking at what a 2020 EV can do, it was very difficult to start looking back to early model Nissan Leaf’s and being happy — even if the cold, hard reality was that they would almost certainly be entirely adequate for my personal use-case.

Unlike Isey’s situation — I don’t have to drive 500km in a day. And I especially don’t have to do it contending with the extreme cold temperature’s of Canada. I have to drive perhaps 40km in a day (typically less, closer to 30km) and as much as I might complain — the temperature’s here in New Zealand (or at least in my part, Auckland) are very moderate. So there would be no real effect of the cold to worry about bringing the effective range of the car down.

A Plug-in Hybrid EV (PHEV) would in fact have enough range to get me to work and back on a typical day without ever having to activate the petrol engine.

And if I was willing to bear the maintenance costs associated with a single car having two engines that might be a real option for me. If we could conceivably live as a one-car family, and therefore had to consider our longer holiday drives as well… Well, that would also make a PHEV quite compelling.

The reason I thought looking into the newer vehicles was such a mistake was that they were just too far outside any kind of reasonable price range. Even the otherwise quite ‘budget’ options of the Hyundai Ioniq entry-level for the 2020 models were starting off ~$60k NZD.

Nope.

However, what I later found — and what I’ll be taking a look at over the course of this weekend — is that dealers will sometimes look to sell the previous year’s models that were being used as demo cars. And in this space, some decent deals exist. Particularly because as a demo car all the options are there. The car will usually be in the top trim (or configuration) where such exist.

The local Nissan dealer has two such ex-Demo cars to go right now.

So all going well? That image above could well be one I could take very shortly. Even to the colour! (Although the other option is a gun-metal grey). I prefer the look of the white, I think. But the grey has slightly lower km’s on the clock.

I’ll provide an update however this goes before the weekend is out! :)