As the teenagers get taller, the limitations of the Leaf are starting to become apparent. Don’t get me wrong, the 2018 Nissan LEAF is a great car, but suffers from two limitations: Limited legroom in the back and longer motorway journey times than necessary. Most of the time, these are just fine, but for family ski-trips deep into Quebec, these two problems become a bit of a bother.
Lets start by discussing the problem. When I sit in the back of our 2018 Nissan Leaf S, my knees hit the front seat. When the kids were shorter, this was not much of a problem, but as the teenagers start to drive, I am now often in the back. Then there is the LEAF’s limited range. With the roofbox on, I can get 150 km or so at highway speeds, on a recent trip to Montreal (source), this translated into 3 charging stops, and an extra hour of driving. Each charging stop was about an hour in length.
With a more modern EV, say the Kia EV4, I can potentially make that one charging stop, stick to the speedlimit (perhaps adding HST). That charging stop might be as short as 30 minutes. Well, the aforementioned 10 hour oddisey (7 hrs of driving plus 3 hours of charging) are all of a sudden a neat 6 hour package. Plus the teenagers should fit just fine in the back of the EV4.
There is much to like about the Kia EV4, in partiuclar the Wind trim. It has decent headroom and legroom, both front and back. The range is excellent at 552 km, quite the step up from the 242 km on the Nissan LEAF (EPA cycle range figures source and source). Charging is even better, 10->80% in half an hour, plus thermal management is available in the EV4 (source), enabling consistent fast charges on a long road-trips with many charging stops.
Higher trims of the EV4 bring nice upgrades at a reasonable price, but they all have a sunroof. This eats into head-room and makes roof-racks a trickier proposition (source).
We did explore the used market where one can find many Ioniq 5’s and EV6’s. However, recently the Canadian government re-started the 5k EV incentive (source). Thus the EV4’s MSRP of $46k in the Wind trim, becomes an interesting $41k (source). The tricky part now, is to value the difference between new and used. Not only that, but a used EV6 is roomier but less efficient than the EV4. How all that shakes out, is very individualistic, but we felt that a 35k maximum made sense. Autotrader revelaed about 9 EV 6’s, mostly 2023 model year and older, with perhaps 60k-100k kilometers on the clock. That we felt was too many kilometers, and thus we bit the bullet and signed for a new Kia EV4.
Electric car adventures 