As money is tight for a lot of people, I thought it would be nice to share some money saving tips. They may not be applicable to you, but hopefully it’s useful for some.

  1. Get a bike / ebike for small distances. I’m originally from The Netherlands and we use a bike very often. NZ is so different, most people tend to take the car for every trip. I’ve seen people take the car for a trip of literally 25 meter… I’ve bought an ebike to do my daily commute to the train station and it’s awesome. No traffic stress, saves money, and good for the environment. I’ve got a $1400 ebike, The Warehouse recently had one for less than $1000.

  2. Get an electric car. We replaced our Corolla with a $15k Leaf with 130km range. The prices have gone down, and a similar model can now be found for $11k or so. It saves us about $3.5k / year on petrol & maintenance. We only use it in the Wellington region, and rarely run out of range. On longer trips we use quick chargers, within 15 minutes it’s back to 80% charge. At least every 70km on state highways there’s a quick charger. While I’m against borrowing money for a car, in this case it may be worth it. With BNZ you can get a 1% loan for 3 years.

  3. Switch electrical provider. We switched to Octopus Energy. $0 daily charge and cheapest. Also good solar buy back, and cheaper nightly rates to charge an EV. /edit : apparently Octopus no longer has zero daily charge on new connections.

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The thing putting me off with the leafs is the battery degradation. 130km range would do me nicely but as that reduces (especially with fast charging) it gets less viable once it goes under about 100km.

Other EVs that don’t have this problem cost way more at the moment, and I don’t drive enough to justify dropping 30-40k on a car.

I guess you can potentially sell when it’s no longer usable for your needs and you still save compared to an ICE vehicle?

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Funny, degredation was my main concern as well. If you don’t QC a lot, the battery degredation is not bad. Our soh has dropped less than 0.5% in 6 months.

Even if it depreciates to 0 dollar (unlikely) in 4 years time we’re still almost break even. And it drives so much nicer than an ICE.

There are also options to convert it to home storage and/or replace the battery with a much bigger and better battery. Eg 16 blade which should release this year.

There are also better 2nd gen Leafs for around the 20k mark. They would still degrade, but range is higher. Also, some are still under warranty.

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Interesting, thanks. Yeah I’d heard that they were pretty stable with limited quick charging. The main thing holding me back was a lot leafs on trademe are close to or below that 100km mark would be my very maximum daily range.

True about the depreciation and options for second life as home backup batteries though so maybe something with enough range would be alright for a few years then pass it on. Perhaps I’ll take another look.

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A 30kwh leaf with 70% soh has about 135km range and I’ve seen them for around 11-12k. On average they degrade about 1-4% per year.

Also good to keep it below 80% charge

Any questions, just ask!

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