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Are there any passionate Nissan Leaf owners here?
Specifically the 1st generation Leaf. I'm curious if this is a viable used car option. I know Nissan discontinued the platform and I heard rumblings that there wasnt much support / repair parts available from Nissan. Is this true? If it is true, is it a car that can be repaired easily yourself? Is there a community for 3rd party parts and new batteries?
Not a passionate Leaf owner but had a coworker that was into these a few years ago so I can recall some of the info. I think it's a viable option if you have a fairly short commute round trip and don't drive long distances on the weekends. Range is roughly 40-80 miles I think depending on model year and battery health. Most parts are fairly easy to source since they used fairly standard Nissan parts. They produced so many of them that body parts are also easy to source from junkyards and stuff. The complexity in these cars is basically the EV driving components: inverter, charger, and main battery of course. You can source inverters and chargers from Nissan but its better economically to just buy them from junkyards since so many Leafs are out there with just bad batteries but good electronics. It's basically impossible to get batteries from Nissan. There's a decent market out there for used batteries from other Leafs but other people quickly snatch them up to sell for a markup. There's third party replacements too but I have no info on them.