While this is great, you do face a problem if you live in apartments/flats, or are renting a place which doesn’t have a viable socket outside. This is definitely something you should look into before you buy, make sure that you can consistently access a plug point each night. Many of our interviewees did note that the Nissan Leaf is a great second car, but until the charging network sees further development in Sri Lanka, it’s still difficult for the Leaf to become your main vehicle. Then again, if you don’t travel far very often, and you have the good sense to charge your Leaf each night, this might be a great option for you. The recent tax hike which has the market in disarray actually brought the prices for the Leaf down, but don’t expect to see an immediate impact on the market, so if you are getting geared up to purchase a Leaf, it’s still going for around Rs.3.5Million.
There are two main charging functions, first the standard charging port which you can plug into a wall socket. This is probably going to be your main source of power, plug in the Leaf at night, set the charging time, and then go to bed—you’ll be looking at ~5-6 hours to charge up the Leaf if you’ve done a bit of driving that day. The second charging function is the rapid charge, which is supposed to get you to 80% in just 40 minutes.
So, do you actually save money on fuel? A very emphatic YES! In general, the people we talked to say they save between Rs.5,000 to Rs.10,000 on fuel each month but with varying travel distances, it’s hard to figure out how much you might save, so let’s use the following scenario:
You travel 100km per day. The average car uses ~12-15 litres of fuel to travel that distance, which means you’ll be paying Rs. 1,536 - 1,920 (95 Octane)
Let’s assume you are a bit of an aggressive driver and only get 100km on a full charge in your Leaf (24kW Battery). Due to the tiered billing system for electricity, it can be a little complicated to calculate how much it’ll cost you, but We know, the math isn’t 100% accurate, and you probably won’t be charging your vehicle fully each night or travelling 100km per day, but just to give you an understanding of your savings, there’s a ~50% to 60% saving on your fuel bill.
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