No More NissanConnect

The 1st gen Nissan LEAFs came with a 2G Telemetry Unit (TCU), which is a cellular modem that allows the car to talk to the Nissan Connect/CarWings backend. This gave some neat features like being able to remotely poll the charge level, start/stop charging (if plugged in), and perhaps, most importantly, remotely trigger the climate control to preheat/cool the vehicle before you get into it. The latter is especially useful in the coldest winter months where you want to be able to heat up the car on AC power before you leave. With some API hacking I even had the thing hooked up to Google Home so I could voice activate these commands.

However, 2G is pretty dated technology now, and Rogers (the remaining operator of 2G on which Nissan had all the vehicles registered with on some prior agreement) is finally pulling the plug after extending it for a year. This has happened a while back in the US and Nissan even offered to pay for most of the upgrade, costing the consumer only $199 USD. However, in Canada they did not offer this option and a few years back when people started thinking about this, various folks were getting answers ranging from "its not possible" to a whopping $2000 or so from the dealers. Since then, the active recall on most 1st gen LEAFs was to just disable the 2G before the service ends.

For posterity, I took a snapshot on Dec 31 2020, which is probably one of the last time the car "talks" back to the server/app:

While I considered building my own OVMS setup complete with an always-on lithium pack and GPS module for location logging, in the end I decided to hold off for now as finishing off this PhD while raising two kids after packing up our lives on the other side of the continent means there are probably more pressing matters to attend to ;). Also, since we're back on the milder West Coast now, the need to pre-heat/cool the car is a lot less, considering it is parked in the underground parkade most of the time.

One thing that I will probably miss more than the other features of Nissan Connect/CarWings, is the extensive data that I was logging prior to the shutdown. While I got lazy after a certain amount of time (and having moved to where the JuiceBox wasn't logging charging data any more), the nearly two years of monthly charging and driving yielded some interesting overall results. The most interesting one is probably this one, that shows that there is an optimal ambient temperature for driving efficiency. Each dot is the average of an entire month of driving, plotted against the average temperature:

Based on this, the efficiency peaks at somewhere between 10 and 20 C, and the best explanation beyond extreme temperature situations that limit battery performance is that there is very little use of AC/heat! Since most of our driving is in the city and we spend quite a lot of time sitting in traffic, the energy used to not move the car becomes quite significant, especially in winter.

Coupled with this, here is the power grid to battery conversion efficiency:

Note that this was nearly all at L2, which should have as high as low 90%'s conversion efficiency from wall input to battery output. In the winter, even though the actual L2 charging rate remains similar, we spend a lot more time topping up the pack (which means having to trickle charge/balance the pack as it approaches 100%, and that wastes more energy than charging at full speed at lower levels). There's probably some cold weather dependent behaviour on the battery itself too, but I would guess at this point most of it is because we need to top up to 100% a lot more often in the winter. The final graph, showing how many days between charges, kinda corroborates this:

Here we see that in general, the colder it is, the fewer days there are per charge. In the worst months we're basically charging every single day. Of course this doesn't take into account variability of driving habits, but when you take the same commute every day over a period of 2 years, the data tends to be relatively consistent even if you take the odd weekend trip here and there...

When we first realized that there was no route for Nissan to (reasonably) provide this TCU upgrade, I was definitely a bit disappointed since the car logged all this information in the background automatically. Having the exact energy consumption over distance driven for every trip was pretty neat from a data perspective (privacy advocates should probably take note of this however). But in the end, I guess I can be glad that I was able to get this data while it worked, and I'm sure if (when) we get the next vehicle, the kind of connectivity options will be even better. The Nissan API was extremely slow and didn't work from time to time, but overall, it served us well for the couple of years we had it.

Back in BC

Due to these unprecedented times, we have made an unexpected decision to move back to BC. One thing we had to decide was whether to sell the LEAF in QC and buy another one here, or to ship it back (since driving it back would take a very long time with all the charging in between!)

After seeing the market price difference of a few thousand dollars, coupled with the sentimental value, we ultimately decided to have it shipped back by rail. After shopping around a bit (and trying best to filter through reviews that are subject to certain selection bias), we decided to go with Livingston that provided us with a quote of around $1300 including pickup in Montreal.

We had to car charged up to around 80%, expecting it to be flat bedded for the 20-30km in Montreal to the rail yard that should leave around 50% or so which is a good storage level for the 2-3 week train journey.

However, they ended up sending two drivers and actually driving the car there, so the car only had around 30% during the trip. This would not have been an issue except that the pickup location is on Annacis Island, which is about 30-ish km from our final destination. So, after its arrival I found a L2 at the Research Centre to get it to around 50% before attempting the journey home.

All in all, it was a relatively smooth experience and the car arrived without any issues (apart from being a bit dusty as they kept the windows cracked during the trip).

Now that it's on the milder West Coast, we expect the car to age out a lot more gracefully without the extreme cold winters and terrible potholes that likely caused a lot of wear on the suspension. The car in fact has been developing a clickety sound at low speeds which we'll have to get looked at at some point...

Electric Snow Blower!

Since our back alley is not plowed in the winter, every time we get a snow dump (which is quite a few here in Montreal), I have manually shovel a path down the back lane (about 4 houses-wide, or roughly 30 metres) as well as our driveway.

This year, I finally decided to seek some motorized help. Seeing the irony of running a gas snowblower just so I could park in the back to charge an EV, and not really willing to shell out $400+ for a battery powered electric blower, I went for the corded option. Costco sells a very nice, thick gauge 30m extension cord for a very reasonable price. It's actually thick enough that you could power a L1 EVSE through it, as long as you keep the contact terminals in good order. In fact, beyond undersized wiring, the contact points is where most fires start and the main reason why using extension cords are generally not recommended.

In the end I went for a Snow Joe 618E (they make a lot of slightly different models, probably just to confuse the buyer between online and retailer options). The main numbers to look for are clearing width, and amperage. Other small differences include an LED light, and metal studs on the blade (the 618E was plastic). But in the end I chose one that was a compromise between price and power/features, and the slightly lower amperage could mean less tripping on iffy breakers.

Overall, it worked very well for the relatively large amount of fresh snow we had (~30cm). I can see it struggling with slush, but for what I need to do (which is to clear a car-wide path down the lane), it should do fine.

What has been a bit more of a nuisance this year, is the ups and downs in temperature creating all that ice... but this is more of a problem as a pedestrian since they've kept the roadways quite well all considered.

First camping trip!

First camping trip with the LEAF! We decided to go up to Mt Orford for one night (first camping trip for the 2nd one @ 5 months, so not sure how well the night would go...).

The trip from Montreal required one Quick Charge on the way in Bromont which meant a comfortable buffer (around 35% at Bromont and about 40-something when we arrived at camp).

We got a site with electrical hookup, although there are a good number of Circuit Electrique L2 stations around the site.

Topping up overnight on 110V using the stock EVSE:

This was the first time we've used it to charge the car since getting it!

Overall pretty smooth trip, and the kids had a lot of fun on the lake!

May 2018

Looks like we're climbing further up in terms of efficiency as it gets warmer. We're seeing 5 battery temp bars all the time now, and one other interesting thing is that because we did fewer charges to 100%, the charging efficiency is now almost 10% higher. I wonder however if temperature has a role to play as well. Will see when it cools down again, I suppose...

Here's all the data for May. Will have to put it into a table at some point...

Charging Efficiency: 92%
Total Grid in:  129 kWh
Total Battery Out: 118 kWh
Average Temperature: 14C
Kilometers Driven: 988 km
Grid to road km/kWh:  7.66 km/kWh
Battery to road km/kWh: 8.37 km/kWh
Charging days: 12 (once every 2.6 days)

Moving up in the rankings!

With the warm weather and summer tires, we've been eeking close to 9km/kWh this past week. Average for the month so far has been over 8, which is something we probably didn't even dream of when we first got the car over the winter.

Would be interesting to see what our winter efficiency is next year, after getting the hang of eco driving!

Following shows the "regional" rankings on Nissan Connect.

Given the fact that we started with rank 9554 in Jan, I would guess that "regional" in this case applied to the entire North America, since I think there were less than 6000 Leafs in Canada at that point in time.

Stacked up against the entire world, we're almost in the top 10%!

And in Canada, we've hit the top 25!

"leaft6yxk" is not the most interesting name, and was auto generated by Nissan Connect support when we were having trouble setting things up. Unfortunately it seems like the 2018 customers are still experiencing issues with the service. Hope Nissan can up their game on the IT front at some point. I've been really happy with the mere existence of the telemetry data, but having more reliable and faster servers would greatly improve the customer experience!

April, 2018

Another month has passed.

It was definitely warmer, and as a result efficiency has gone up a bit more. Tallying up the numbers:

Charging Efficiency: 84%
Total Grid in:  112.2 + 22.1 (public) = 134 kWh
Total Battery Out: 113 kWh
Average Temperature: 4C
Kilometers Driven: 780 km
Grid to road km/kWh:  5.53 km/kWh
Battery to road km/kWh: 6.9 km/kWh
Charging days: 14 (once every 2.1 days)

The graph in the previous post should include this most recent data point... :)

First road trip!

Took our first long-ish trip since getting the car today, to a cabane a sucre about an hour's drive out of town.

The trip was about 70km one way, to Sucrerie de la Montagne. We charged to 100% in the morning before church, and was originally hoping to do a quick charge once back on the island which should have been pretty reasonable given the relatively warm weather. However, due to the relatively hilly terrain once we got near Rigaud, we ended up using more power than originally anticipated. Therefore, to play it extra safe we decided to charge at the St-Hubert in Vaudreuil-Dorion on the way home. In the end we drove about 100km before reaching the charger, and had around 30% left so it was erring on the side of caution.

In the warmer weather, we were able to hit a bit over 100 amps on the quick charger, and gained just a bit less than 12 kWh in 27 minutes, giving an average charge rate of about 26kW. This was considerably better than the ~10kW rate we were seeing when it was -10C!

In total we drove 140km that day, and consumed 20kWh of energy, resulting in a round figure of 7.0 km/kWh. Had we not gunned it at 110km/hr during certain highway stretches, I expect the mileage could have been a hair better.

Driving efficiency trends compared to temperature

Because we all like pretty graphs...

Below shows aggregate data from Nissan Connect showing driving efficiency vs average monthly temperature. Temperature was taken from weatherunderground for the Downtown Montreal station, and represents the average value for the month.

The graph should be automatically updated as more data is entered... so expect more points to appear as time goes by!

Leg room in the back? Yes please!

I hope to not do this too often in the future (as its a huge pain to get in and out of the car), but this shows how much room you have in the back of the car, at least for relatively small folks like us (I'm 5'7" and the wife is 5'6"):

Whats perhaps more impressive is that I'm able to squeeze between the two child seats. The Foonf on the right is super slim, but the bucket seat on the left kinda flows over a bit.

Probably do not want to be in the middle during a side impact... So we're working on convincing the older one that the other parent needs to keep the driver company up front.

Survived our first winter...

You hear stories of losing up to 40% of range in winter (possibly true if you like to keep a toasty cabin and drive on the freeway), but for our relatively short commute, this was not our biggest issue of our first winter with an EV.

Our greatest challenge so far was actually accessing our parking spot behind our house this winter. We had an extraordinary amount of snow this year (the city ran out of the budgeted 5 snow removal operations, and also had to approve an additional dump site). Here are some shots of our back lane.

Easter Weekend, and it looks like winter might finally be behind us! Here's a view of our back lane on Easter Monday:

A few weeks ago in mid-March, when hope was in sight:

Early March, the last (hopefully) big snow dump of ~20-30cm. Our daughter helping out:

I may want to invest in a snow blower next year... both myself and my visiting parents spent quite a few evenings outdoors this winter doing this:

Another shot from earlier on in the winter. Note the big pile on our deck, as it is supposedly illegal to move snow from rear parking spots onto public property. (As far as we know, clearing the back lane is A-OK and we have not heard back from the city saying otherwise)

Next up: swapping on the summer tires to see how much they change in efficiency!

Conversion Efficiency, March 2018

Details from this post.

After another complete month of driving, here are the numbers for March 2018:

Efficiency: 83%
Total Grid in:  157.4 + 22.6 (public) = 180kWh
Total Battery Out: 150 kWh
Average Temperature: -1C
Kilometers Driven: 995km
Grid to road km/kWh:  5.53 km/kWh
Battery to road km/kWh: 6.63km/kWh
Charging days: 13 (once every 2.4 days)

No definitive reasons why the efficiency is up slightly, but one potential reason is that we've been charging to 100% less often. It's a bit difficult to keep a tally on that one...

Limiting charge to 80%, Why (or why not?). Some JuiceNet features

There is some debate out there whether charging to 80% (as opposed to full) gives you better battery health in the long run. Various factors include a potentially dodgy battery chemistry in the first generation of LEAFs, a class action lawsuit in the US, and general theories on lithium battery technology.

However, the following factors make me believe that in general, the 80% setting is not necessary for battery longevity. It may make a difference, but should not be a significant factor for more recent models. When you charge to a full 100%, the actual cell voltages get to around 4.1V, which actually corresponds to around 90% according to typical lithium battery discharge curves. (A really full battery should hit 4.2V). So if you aimed for 80% charge on the dashboard, you're actually more like 70% or so. Heat and time still seems to be larger factors, from most sources I've seen. Another factor that I think plays a huge role is how aggressively you cycle the batteries, which means a.) Quick charge use and b.) aggressive acceleration and regen. Of course, if you look far enough there'll always be anecdotal evidence to the contrary, but most general information out there seem to be relatively consistent.

So, why would we want to charge to 80%? Actually, after some further testing, we've started going towards 90%... For us, there are the following reasons:

1.) Given our typical commute of less than 20km per day, we do not need the full capacity of the battery

2.) Perhaps more importantly, having a full charge limits the amount of regeneration available. Since we do mostly city driving with a lot of start and stops, and it is not always feasible to coast towards every stop, being able to regen means that in the long run, we will be saving energy.

3.) Another energy saving factor is that since there is a fixed charging overhead of around 300W (to run the cooling pumps and other charging circuitry), charging beyond 80% or so becomes significantly less efficient due to the charge rate slowing down as the cells are being topped up and balanced fully. Basically at that point, you continue to consume ~300W but the % gained by the battery slows down significantly. Having said that, the process of cell balancing is important and should be done once in a while. Our current habit is to do a full balance every 3 or 4 charges, which works out to be around once every two weeks (depending on weather and driving needs).

So, how do we do it?

Without a smart EVSE, one can simply set the car's charge timer to a slightly later time than the actual departure. This will hold off charging when you plug the car in and only start X hours before your departure time. X is calculated based on the power of the supply you're plugged into, and ranges from about 5-7 hours on full Level 2 (240V 27A) to 14+ hours on Level 1 (110V 15A) for a typical charge. This requires some guesswork which gets better with experience as you have to figure out how much exactly in advance you set the time to hit the charge level you need. However, since we already invested in a JuiceBox, it's a lot more convenient to use the built in features which are accessible from the smartphone app and web consoles. Here's what the main charging screen looks like:

As we've set the vehicle to a 2014 Leaf, it knows that 24kWh of energy is a full battery. From there it allows you to set a target value for each charge session. Above we see the small triangle on the gauge set to 60%. What this will do is limit the amount of energy piped to the car to 24*.6 = 14.4kWh.

It should be noted that the amount of energy that is metered through the EVSE will not be exactly what the battery gains, due to a variety of loss factors and estimation of actual charge levels on the dash. In our experience, what you ask the JuiceBox to give to the car, compared to what the car actually gains, is actually 5-10% more when aiming for a target in the 80-90% range. I expect the value to be closer when the charge level is in the more linear voltage vs energy level range (i.e. below 80%).

In addition to the charge limit, we can also apply the "Time Of Use" feature to start charging at a later point in time:

Here in Quebec we don't have time of use billing so the consumption rate is same any time of the day, but this scheduling can be used to control when your car is fully charged, similar to the car's built in charge timer. The convenience once again is that you can set this from anywhere via the app or web portal.

All in all, a "smart" EVSE is probably not essential, but for people who like to look at data, it's probably a great compliment to the telemetry data that you get with the SV/SL models!

Another LEAF! (kinda)

So after about 3 weeks or so, we got a very cute Tomica die-cast model of the LEAF from a Japanese seller on eBay:

Pros: Matches the car very well, as you'd expect from Japanese attention-to-detail

Cons: Right-hand drive, and kinda expensive for a die-cast at nearly $20 after shipping (it's almost double the price of the current 2018 model! :P)

The kid loves it!

Exploiting charging station for free parking (This is why we can't have nice things)

Circuit Electrique runs the biggest public charging network in Quebec. The company behind it, AddEnergie, may be better known by residential EVSE users elsewhere as the maker of the Flo residential units. They also operate the L3 DCFC stations. While there are very few free public stations around these parts, we are to have a good number of them!

Here the L2 stations are billed in two ways: most are $1/hr, billed by the minute. A few are $2.50 per session, which make it a great deal for a full top-up of larger battery vehicles like the Bolt. They are available both at free and metered locations. Some metered parking locations will have free parking for EV charging (but you pay for the charge).

During the two days of going back and forth to the hospital after the birth of our second daughter, we made use of a Circuit Electrique charging station that is conveniently located across the street from the Glen superhospital site. It is an area that is relatively busy, and otherwise you'd have to pay to park. However, the charging spot is free to park when charging.

Here I bumped into a SmartED, which appeared like this on both days:

Whats interesting is that the charger lights up as green and shows as "available", but there is actually a car plugged into it. The first time I didn't think much of it, but the next day I saw the owner leave the vehicle with the charge active (indicated by a white light), but 5 minutes later when I went past the light was green again. So this was no accident...

What I then realized was that this individual was actually exploiting a loophole in the billing procedure to get free parking! Here the stations charge by the minute (at $1/hr), and in places like this one, you get free street parking while charging. However, in this case there is a flaw where the billing stops when the car stops charging, and the station display shows the message "please return plug", but somehow the billing stops and the station availability clears up! I confirmed this as I was leaving the station by stopping the charge through hitting the release button on the J1772 plug, but did not actually unplug it. I left it for another 2 minutes, but the bill timer had already stopped and the station returned to "available" status. 

I wrote an email to AddEnergie and they said it is clearly a violation of parking regulations and a billable offence. However, I'm not sure if the meter attendants are aware of this particular detail, so folks like this one are slipping by. Eventually I expect such loopholes will be closed, but in the mean time, you might run into this kind of behaviour once in a while. (On the other hand, having chargers blocked by gasoline vehicles happens a LOT more often... :P)

New addition to the family

We are now officially a 2 child household! How well does the Leaf fit child seats? Better than our '99 Corolla (and much easier to get in and out due to the increased height of the vehicle). Its definitely not a huge car by North American standards, but being used to compacts most of our lives, the Leaf is actually very spacious inside. Here is a infant bucket seat next to a front facing toddler seat:

An adult can be squished in the back, either on the side, or even in the middle between the two seats. The limiting factor is the width of the carseat themselves. For the toddler we picked up a used Clek Foonf that is much slimmer than the EvenFlo (still in the Corolla), and it is much more space efficient while feeling a lot more solid too. The EvenFlo bucket infant seat is actually the wider one that takes up more space. It is possible to wedge in a (smaller) adult on the side, or even between the two car seats in the middle. Getting out is a bit of an issue in the latter case. We've since traveled with the full allotment of 3 adults and 2 kids (as well as the 4 adult 1 kid permutation). Definitely not ideal, but doable if needed.

Internet hearsay suggests its possible, with the right combination, to have THREE child seats in the back. I would not think of such a thing, for safety and many other reasons :P. At that point I would definitely pine for the passenger version of the e-NV200, which has yet to cross the pond...

Here's the Leaf parked outside the Glen super hospital site with a conveniently located public charging terminal. At $1/hr for charge and no parking fees, it beats the other pay parking spots around there!

As someone not accustomed to publicly advertising my family composition or vehicle contents, I reluctantly made this addition to the car after being tired of getting tailgated and honked at in the 30km/hr zones in our neighbourhood:

Time will tell how well it works...

Feb 2018: Grid to Road Efficiency. (Spoiler: its about 80%!)

After a few complete months of driving, I've gathered some interesting numbers for consumption. In this case, we're looking at the conversion from the electrical grid to what the battery provides for the motor. The ultimate figure in terms of distance can be easily found on the odometer.

To measure the electricity from the grid, we use the data logging features of the JuiceBox that tallies up all the charging sessions. Here's our charging log for the month showing a total of 161.1kWh:

Circuit Electrique, the only public charging network we've used so far, provides energy consumption info as well (despite billing by time only).

From the above two sources, we have a total of 182kWh of energy provided to the car from the grid, not counting the energy consumed by the EVSE to facilitate the charge. I expect this ancillary value to be negligible considering the simple electronics involved... the public station might be a bit more power hungry but as you can see above, we don't use them much.
What might also be interesting is we charged a total of 14 times (not counting the small blips shown in the JuiceNet chart above, which is probably from pre-heat after a night of charging. this value actually *slightly* overstates our energy input, but we can ignore it for this rough analysis... :P). This is basically once every 2 days, on average. I expect things will be better once the weather gets warmer.

On the car end, Nissan Connect/CarWings contains detailed info under the confusingly named "electric rate simulation" menu. Here we can find the net power output measured from the battery. The actual number is the total energy consumed by the car, minus the amount recovered through regeneration, and measured 146kWh.

Putting the two together, we find an overall efficiency of about 80% from grid input to battery output. This source measures L2 efficiency to around 90%. However, this is what the battery gets on the INPUT, after PDM conversion and charging overhead only. It doesn't account for how much the battery gains from that input power, and as we know, we always lose some due to heat. Additionally, when charging the car to a full 100%, after about 80% or so the charge rate slows down to balance the cells, and in this situation, the relative efficiency will go down further as the charging overheads stay the same. So all in all, a not-surprising value. Finally, one more obvious assumption we make here is that the roll-over effects at the beginning/end of the month are negligible.

One conclusion worth considering at this point is if you're on level 1 charging exclusively, you would see an even more significant loss. Because electricity is still so much cheaper than gas, its likely not a huge deal unless you drive a lot so from a purely financial perspective, you might not actually need to install a level 2 at home. On the flip side, if you drive a lot, you probably want to have a L2 charger at home to gain the mileage back at a faster rate anyways.

Putting Some More Numbers Together

Some other interesting numbers to keep track of, which I will try to do on a more regular basis:

Efficiency: 80% Average temperature: -5C
Kilometers driven: 835km
Grid to road km/kWh: 4.58 km/kWh
Battery to road km/kWh: 5.72km/kWh
Charging days: 14 (once every 2.0 days)

I will try to compile these values every month, as soon as the data is available.

Glamour Shot

The car definitely has a very... polarizing look. And the almost toy-like paint gives it an additional dimension of quirkiness. We definitely don't mind it!

Taken at the Church of St Andrew and St Paul on a morning with a glimpse of spring. I was there extra early for something, and was able to get a spot. (Since later this spring, all parking in the circle is reserved as accessible parking on Sunday mornings)

The Car

14 Dec, 2017. We took the car today!

The vehicle: a 2014 Blue Ocean Leaf SL. The car was near the end of a 4 year lease, and the previous owner switched to a PHEV due to changing commuting needs requiring greater range. The car was leased from Nissan Repentigny, where we did the initial visit a week prior and decided to go for it. The car was in pristine shape in and out, and the rear seats were never sat in - the previous owner was from a two-car household with two adults (this will shortly change for us!). The only thing that changed between Dec 7 and 14 was a lot more snow on the road, and the exterior was a bit more dirty compared to the first visit. The previous owner, like most people who are driving an EV at this point in time, was very enthusiastic to show us all the ins and outs of the vehicle.

It has about 47000km on the ODO, and the battery capacity was 12 bars. Using LeafSpy, we found the State of Health to be 94%, Hx a similar value. These are quite good for a 4 year vehicle.

The reason that a lease transfer this late was attractive to us was twofold: First, this gave us an opportunity to try out the car with little commitment to keep it. Second, since it was close to the end of the lease, the remaining lease payments + residual made the total price relatively competitive with used offerings, especially consider the first point.

Is an EV right for us?

These topics are probably discussed to death elsewhere on the internet, and here is our own personal perspectives on the main reasons against choosing an electric car: range and price.

Range

The most obvious one is range. This is not an issue for our normal commute of 15km roundtrip on weekdays, or double if have to make the back and forth trip twice for various reasons. Our grocery runs include Costco on Bridge Street (about 5km one way), and Kim Phat in Brossard (about 15km).

What will be a real test is further out of town trips (such as the Granby Zoo), or parks and campgrounds that are beyond 1-2 hrs drive from the city. Quebec has an impressive public charging network including fast chargers on major highways, and we will definitely be making use of those in the summer. A road trip to Toronto would probably be unrealistic, even if physically possible.

With the significantly shorter range compared to a full tank of gas, as well as the long time it takes to actually "fill up", there is definitely a consequent hit on convenience. We haven't fully figured out how it will end up affecting us, but at the moment remain optimistic that we'll be able to make adjustments to our driving (and parking) habits to make it work. Time will tell!

Price

An EV is still priced much higher than a similarly equipped internal combustion engine vehicle. The LEAFs that we have been looking at generally went between $15-20,000CAD after tax. This is not a small price to pay considering our 1999 Corolla is, by most means, still fully functional and running like clockwork at 180,000kms. As an LE model, even all the electronics and AC are still working fine. So for us, the decision to switch is not based purely from a financial perspective.

However, with a second child on the way, we've realized that driving them to daycare/school will be inevitable for the foreseeable future given where we live currently, and at some point our trusty steed that has been in our family for nearly 20 years will eventually be in need of replacing. Having never purchased a "nice" car ever in our lives (see point about existing vehicle), we decided to splurge a bit on something that has a variety of potentially positive impact in the future.

In the long run, assuming we do commute regularly with the car (especially in the colder months), we may even win out in the end financially, but know that this was not the primary reason for our choice.

As we see more used EVs on the market (especially in Quebec), we do think that the point where it becomes financially attractive to drive electric for most people is within a few years especially in Canada where most our electricity is generated cleanly and cheaply (and gas prices are considerably higher than our neighbours down south).