Range anxiety remains a major barrier to mass electric car adoption. After all, Frankfurt is a big place, and many of us see more than 200 miles of highway every week. But imagine for a moment that you live in a city, take public transit to and from work, and rarely drive far from home. Maybe you want a car for a trip to the grocery store once a week, to visit your brother 20 miles away, or to take Max to a nice dog park—the one in the next town over. If any of this sounds familiar, you might look at an electric car and think, "Hey, that's not a bad idea."
For apartment-dwelling buyers who drive only 200 miles every few weeks (or every few months), electric cars offer a compelling proposition: low maintenance, low running costs, and a small environmental footprint. To see how easy it is to live in the city with an electric car, I decided to try it myself.
Choosing an Electric Car
Okay, so I didn't really pick up the car in this situation. Nissan gave me the 2020 Leaf SL Plus. With an EPA-estimated driving range of 215 miles, it'll get me around town for my usual errands, and I'll still be able to run my typical testing loop without worrying about running out of charge. I might have to plug it in once or twice before returning it, giving the delivery driver a full battery for the drive back to the garage.
That leaf is a good option for this test. Despite Tesla's ubiquity in the collective young-urban-professional psyche, the relatively humble Leaf is the best-selling electric vehicle worldwide. It offers both a standard Type 2 plug for slow and fast AC charging and a Chad MO plug for fast DC charging. My Nissan Leaf cannot use a Tesla Supercharger station.
Range anxiety? Try Range Serenity.
During my week with the Leaf, the temperature fluctuated between 30 and 60 degrees. I've never had a problem with the displayed remaining range disappearing faster than the miles I've driven. After leaving home with 200 miles of range and driving through my 34-mile loop, with stop-and-go traffic, wide-open freeways, a few select backroads, and a section of city driving, I parked the car. 165 miles to go. In the battery
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