Despite recently putting my expected delivery date back 3 weeks Nissan called me on the 27th July to say my LEAF had arrived, 2 days prior to the earliest delivery date I had received during the order period. I was on a business trip so it had to wait until Sat 30th to get the car.

As expected the purchase took a long time, the dealer used 3 different staff pushing the Lease on me on the basis that I probably wouldn’t get the $7,500 Federal tax credit as a W2 employee. Plenty of FUD and money shell games were played. I hadn’t realized but the Tennessee $2,500 tax credit is applied at the dealership at the time of purchase. I fortunately realized this before signing papers, I almost gave $1,000 of the rebate away to the dealer thinking I was getting a great deal until I figured out what was what.

The car is what I had hoped for, I got a few pleasant surprises when I reviewed the features with the salesman during final delivery. I’ll detail the positive and not so positive surprises I’ve found to date in separate posts.

The delivery mileage was just 11 miles 2 of which I put on it test driving it prior to committing to buy. At the time of writing we have 90 miles on the vehicle. It soon starts adding up 🙂

Our first trip was about 30 miles, which involved a  few trips to and from the dealer, they forgot to put the temporary tags in the vehicle prior to us driving off. Charging overnight, the charging meter estimated my total cost was a princely 64c. 30 miles for 64 cents, try doing that with a gas car. I like the gas per gallon cost equivalent listed by the charger. $1.19 per gallon is the equivalent cost I am paying.

Tomorrow will be my first time to do the commute to work. I’ll be interested to see how much of the charge it takes up. Driving at higher speeds is less efficient due to wind resistance. Wonder how much per gallon I’ll pay tomorrow. Probably a little more.