Economics of Electric Cars

On the subject of the Nissan Leaf and its battery life, here is a spreadsheet I hope readers find helpful in deciding if it is economically viable to buy an electric car. Not included are differences in maintenance costs nor original purchase price. The intention of this spreadsheet is to decide if battery costs cancel out fuel savings benefits. Fill fields B3 to B16 to customize to your electric car's situation.

Click here to download.

Nissan Leaf Reservation Survey

Today Nissan released a survey to current reservation holders trying to assess their seriousness of demand, and more importantly trying to assess the impact various battery life warranties have on customer demand for the car.

Suspiciously, there was a particular focus on how the attractiveness of the car would change to me as a buyer (on the reservation list) if alternative of a 60K miles or 5 years were the primary battery warranty life (versus Chevy Volt's 100K miles or 8 year package). Also presented in this survey were questions focusing on how much I as a customer would be willing to pay to extend the warranty from both 5 to 8 years, and from 8 to 10 years (or 150K miles).

I have a feeling a little birdie in engineering is telling management anything past 5 years is going to end up costing the company a lot of money in replacing battery cells.