I love the car. It's fun to drive -- smooth, quiet, and zippy acceleration from a stop. I haven't paid for gas or any kind of maintenance in over a year.
But I would definitely not buy a Leaf unless you're a 2-car home and have something else for a backup and long trips.
If you have any fun with your car, as opposed to driving in eco-mode all the time, never accelerating hard, coasting down hills... you won't get the rated range. If it's cold out, you won't get the rated range. If you like to blast the heat and A/C, you won't get the rated range. Which means you will limit yourself to a 20-30 mile radius to feel safe, which is much less than the 80-100+ miles the sticker says you'll get.
The battery also degrades pretty fast. You can't tell what you're buying used unless you buy a copy of Leaf Spy Pro for your phone and hook up a bluetooth OBDII scanner to the car to actually find out how much of its battery life is usable. My 2012 model has 16kWh of the original 24kWh available for driving, though the dashboard shows 11/12 battery life "pips" remaining. That means I get a max of 70-some miles driving conservatively in good weather. It'll only go down the longer I own it, which is why I'm looking forward to that Chevy Bolt, hopefully before winter when my usable range drops even more.
Glad you love it. I work from home and commute sometimes to downtown DC (about 25 mi each way). So I am thinking the 107 mi would be more than enough even being conservative and expecting a 60mi range.
But from what you're saying, it sounds even worse!
We really aren't expecting to do any road trips with the car, instead opting to rent a car for that occasional weekend trip. Seems like a good balance. Why choose a car for the 3 road trips you take every year?
I lease a 2013 LEAF (in 2014). I've now got 17K miles on it. It is my first and only car I ever will lease. I did so because I want a larger range and I knew that such cars would be available "soon", but not soon enough. I also keep my cars for over 10 years. I didn't want to have a 80 mile range LEAF for that long. Thus, I was planning that by around 2017 I'd have better options.
I already didn't expect the Model 3 to really ship to 2018, and since I'm in Massachusetts, if/when we get them they will be maybe a year later than the west coast.
I have the option of extending my lease a bit, but I don't think it will go out far enough to include the Model 3. If the Bolt arrives and is as good as the Volt has been, I will likely get that instead.
FWIW, driving electric has been incredible. Quiet, smooth, and really get acceleration (100% torque when you step on the accelerator). We've got a dozen charging stations at work so I do almost all my charging there. There's been no maintenance cost on the car so far; $0 total in almost 2 years.
Like the sibling poster, I regularly get 65-ish miles without any worry, and have done in the mid-90s (no HVAC, very modest speeds and acceleration).
My normal commute is 16 miles round trip, and I regularly get 4 days out of a charge in the summer and 3 in the winter before deciding (not "needing") to charge.
We also have my wife's 11 year-old CR-V, so I've never felt really "stuck" with the range. The one day I needed the 90 mile range for 2 factory tours, I drove carefully and extra-economically, but also had several charging stations picked out to bail out to.
I'm happy with mine, but would be less so if it was our only car.
If people further east have to wait until 2019 or 2020 to buy these, it could run into phase outs of the tax credits. $7500 off a $35000 is a pretty nice deal. Hopefully those of us out east can still take advantage of it.
I really doubt it'll be that long. If you're on the east coast, you're probably looking at waiting months, not years, after west coast deliveries before you get your car.
It's basically just a game to bump up quarterly numbers. If you're delivering cars that only take a day or two in transit before delivery, your numbers look better than if they spend days or weeks on a truck or train making their way to the other side of the country. This game doesn't pay off as much if you're making people wait years.
If California is getting them in late 2017, it'll be years before I might be able to buy one in Pennsylvania. Bummer.
Looks like it'll be a Chevrolet Bolt replacing my Leaf later this year. Same price tag, same 200+ mile range, can't be too upset.