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In Europe, it's horribly crippled by its non-standard DC charge connector : it's using Chademo, a Japanese standard, while absolutely all other EVs (and charging stations) including the Tesla 3 use combo CCS.

Then there's the Dacia Spring, much cheaper :)

Apparently Nissan are moving to CCS for US/Europe, although I don't see anything that suggests the Leaf will ever catch up. For example: https://chargedevs.com/newswire/the-war-is-over-nissan-to-sw...
It’s also compromised by the lack of active battery management. I don’t know why it doesn’t have it, the Nissan EV vans do.
What’s active battery management? Surely the batteries won’t charge/discharge themselves to death?
Probably referring to temperature management. The Leaf battery is passively air-cooled. Most other EVs are water-cooled, and some even include a chiller.

It becomes a problem for the leaf if you use the fast-charge port too often, for example in a road trip, where the charge rate has to be limited due to the high temperature. (Fast-charging heats the battery.) It can also cause the battery to age faster than normal in hot climates.

> It can also cause the battery to age faster than normal in hot climates.

This is the critical piece for me: ostensibly electric vehicles are cheaper to maintain due to less moving parts, but the inevitable battery pack repair or replacement is a potentially huge cost hanging over the head of the owner. If you're "lucky" the battery pack falls below five bars within the Leaf's 100k mile / 8 year warranty and you get a complete replacement, otherwise Nissan will repair or replace to get the owner to nine of twelve bars.

Please note I'm not making a case against electric vehicles, just against passively cooled battery packs. If you baby an ICE engine, keep it well maintained, change the oil regularly, moving parts in it will still eventually wear out. EV manufacturers need to work on closing that gap between ICE engine durability which can be decades and that of battery packs which is not there yet.

Thing is, it's just the battery packs. Along with the tires, it's practically the only thing on the car that can wear out. The electric motors are practically forever. It doesn't have a transmission. It barely touches the brakes. It doesn't have oil to change. There's no fuel pump, and the cooling pump puts in far less work on warm battery packs than a super-hot engine.

They need to get to Tesla's "million mile battery" eventually, but that doesn't seem like a fusion/AI/warp drive kinda thing. It'll be here before most existing batteries have worn out. At which time a lot of people will want a newer car (with newer features and comforts) anyway.

Yes, that's the theory. So far Car and Driver's testing hasn't yet yielded those savings at their 30k mile update.

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a30209598/2019-tesla-mo...

One of the pitches we hear often on the switch to EV ownership is that electric vehicles are cheaper to maintain. But, as we close in on 40,000 miles in a Tesla Model 3, the actual savings in service costs is turning out to be quite minimal.

Sure, the Model 3 needs no oil changes, which in theory should save us significant cost. However, the Model 3's requirement that we lubricate the brake calipers every year or 12,500 miles—something specified for areas that use road salt in the winter months—has cost nearly as much, totaling $432 for three such services thus far, which often also include a tire rotation. Although that's less than the $539 we spent on maintenance for our BMW M340i or the $728 for our Kia Telluride, that savings works out to between $6 and $15 a month over the course of our nearly two years of ownership, which would be barely noticeable in an owner's budget.

Fairly technical history of Leaf battery troubles:

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/29/nissans-long-strange-tr...

If you lease instead of buying then battery age isn't really a problem.
It's great that brand-new EVs are getting cheaper. Recall aside, a used Chevy Bolt is a much better value. 15-18k USD for 240 mile range, DC "fast" charging (50kV).
If you want "value" ICE subcompact hatches are still going to blow both the bolt and the leaf out of the water at any price point. The purchase price differential is just too big to make up on any reasonable timeline. The amount of driving you'd need to to do make back the difference in gas is beyond what these small EVs can do without unreasonable amounts of mid-trip charging.

You pretty much need a weird use case with really short trips, a little bit of regulatory favoritism and extra cheap charging in order to make these small EVs work out on a pure cost basis.

That's not necessarily true in the used market, although it depends on where you live. Due to how the tax credits work, EVs depreciate precipitously. One the west coast, used EVs are often cheaper than used ICE cars.

You're right that range for used EVs is a significant issue, but with EVs being cheaper, the "make back the difference in gas" argument no longer holds.

Here's an example of a used 2018 Nissan Leaf (https://seattle.craigslist.org/see/ctd/d/renton-2018-nissan-...) for $20k, which ends up being $5k cheaper than a similar 2019 honda civic hatchback (https://seattle.craigslist.org/kit/ctd/d/puyallup-2019-honda...). Hondas are better cars than Nissans, but it's clear that the price gap between EVs and ICE cars has narrowed considerably, to the point that it has basically disappeared.

As another example, you can buy a 2016 Chevy Spark EV for $6k, and the car will have under 50k miles. (Example: https://portland.craigslist.org/wsc/ctd/d/hillsboro-2016-che...). You'd be hard pressed to find a 2015 ICE hatchback with under 50,000 miles at that same $6k price.

If you are buying an upscale commuter car to park beside your spouse's 4Runner what you are saying is absolutely true. A Leaf or Bolt is cheaper than the Civics and Camrys that typically adorn the driveways of good school districts.

If you are mucking about lower in the market ICE is still cheaper. A Mitsubishi Mirage MSRP's for less than the used Leaf costs. ~5-8yo Kia Rios and Souls (and plenty of sedans) are everywhere for a little more or less than the Spark (which is a unicorn) depending on age/miles.

The spark EV is a great deal if you need a stripped down urban runabout. It's an outlier and they aren't exactly readily available used since they were a compliance car with a set of attributes that make the high class consumers that typically buy EVs turn and run. Go sit in any spark. It will be clear why that one is $6k. There is a reason the dealer is advertising it as something that you buy for a teenager. There is a reason someone only put 50k on it in 6yr. If you need transportation and have that much money there are better ways to spend it unless you are very hung up on miles.

Do you know of any "sub compact hatches" that stand it out particularly? I'm not familiar with the kind of car that refers to.
Mitsubishi Mirage, Chevy Spark, Kia Rio, etc.
Kia Rio is #1 for fatalities. I've owned one, they're terrible cars. Drove one from Chicago to Seattle and back. Gotta crank the music to max to drown out the road and engine noise. It's a nightmare on wheels
Let me tell you about this car called the Spark EV. Being EV doesn't make it not a Spark...

Don't get me wrong, these cars are fine cars and go from A to B just like the rest of them but the HN class of consumer who generally poo-poos anything that isn't Toyota Honda, Volvo or Tesla will find reasons to dislike them.

this is the kind of EVs the world needs more and more.

simple, and less overwhelming : technically and financially.

What's the destination charge ? Is it taxes ?
It's the cost of delivering the vehicle from the factory to the dealership.
Destination charges have nothing to do with the actual cost of delivering the vehicle. They're just another sneaky way for manufacturers to advertise an artificially low price which doesn't reflect what consumers actually pay.