Dragon Lake Books

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Nissan Leaf

Digging a trench for Pod Point Cabling and our new Nissan Leaf

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Did I mention we signed up to a PCP deal for a new Nissan Leaf? I’m utterly hooked on the Leaf now. After the initial shock at how quiet the demo car was and then the delight at how good the acceleration is (especially compared to our Diesel Renault), I now can’t imagine not preferring to drive an electric car.

Technically we got the car for my wife, but since we can get free electricity at various charging stations, I’m driving the Leaf a lot more than I thought I would. It’s great! Simpler than a standard automatic and the 30kW Tekna model we chose has these all round cameras that make reversing so much safer.

Anyway, I could bore you for ever so here’s just a couple of photos of a trench and a charger point…

As part of the government scheme to promote electric vehicles, we received money towards a charging point that allows us to charge the Leaf faster than through a standard household socket. We’re keeping the Leaf in our garage overnight and so wanted the charger in the garage. All fine except the garage isn’t attached to the house. So, earlier this week (with some help) I pulled up a slab and proceeded to hack through a foot of grit and clay and rock and cement to prepare a trench so the engineer could lay a cable to the garage. I could have paid £90 for him to do it, but… you know…

The engineer arrived today as scheduled and we now have a Pod Point charger:

The weirdest thing while I was digging that trench – I kept smelling what I initially thought was gas. I’d dig out some clay and worry if I’d hit the gas pipe. Then I reached a foot down (Pod Point asked me to dig down 30cm) and I found what smelled and looked like beach shingle… Very strange. Now I’m wondering if that was imported by the builders who built the house or the garage, or if it had been there all along, under the clay…

Another lightbulb moment

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I know electric cars don’t use fuel. Everyone knows that, right? Not unleaded, not diesel. It’s kind of obvious. Perhaps too obvious?

When we got use of a demo electric car – a Nissan Leaf, apart from setting off, it was no different to normal driving. Setting off is seriously weird though! There is literally no noise, apart from a slight whine which apparently they have had to add to warn pedestrians… You just press your foot on the acelerator, the car begins to move and inside the car you can’t even hear that whine. It feels surreal. Once you pick up speed, the sound of the tyres on the road and cars passing makes it feel more normal.

Anyway… The Nissan Leaf doesn’t use fuel. Though it does need charging…

I forgot to take a record of the mileage before we left the dealership, so did so once we got home. I charged the Leaf using a normal three pin UK socket for a few hours in the evening and again for a couple of hours the next morning.

As well as a kind of “battery life remaining” dial that looks a bit like a fuel gauge, the Leaf shows estimated miles you can travel. By the time I unplugged our Tekna model, the charge was up to 107 miles. You can see this on the right of the image below:

We drove pretty much as normal the next morning – Saturday – with a mix of city and motorway driving. As you can see from the next image, we drove a total of 49 miles and took our remaining miles down by 55 miles to 52:

The Leaf is an electric car… So, we had used the fans and the radio and the heater and played around with the gadgets available. You use electricity in an electric car and it does impact the distance you will be able to travel. But not by much…

I still wasn’t convinced. We were looking at just under £280 a month for three years plus £1,000 deposit on a PCP deal for a second hand car. £11,080 in total, £3694 a year. Far more than we’d ever paid for a car.

Except, the Leaf was really nice. We’ve wanted an electric car for years. Still tempting.

That’s when I had my next lightbulb moment…

You already know this right, so feel free to have a laugh. The Leaf is an electric car. It doesn’t use fuel. Fuel costs money. Money we wouldn’t have to pay each month…

I did a rough calculation of how much we spend on petrol each month (we actually have two cars just now so this is just for the car we’d be replacing.) £108 a month we’d save on petrol.

I travel roughly 170 miles a week on that £108. Per month that would be 736 (170 X 4.33) Nissan estimates it costs £0.02 a mile to charge if you charge using a low rate. Even if you double that, that would cost £29.45 a month, saving £78.55 a month.

Which would bring the monthly total cost of the Leaf (including the deposit) down to £230. (£3694 a year divided by 12 = £307.83 less £78.55)

£230 a month. It’s starting to seem affordable…

A lightbulb moment

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Have you ever had the exhaust fall off your car while driving?

It sounds and feels like the world has exploded underneath you – at least if the front gives way and you’re driving that exhaust into the ground!

Do we or don’t we? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself as we’ve considered buying a Nissan Leaf.

Electric cars are still more expensive than internal combustion, no doubt about that, far more for both new and second hand models than the normal price range we’d look at.

A dealership offered us the chance to take a 30kW Tekna home overnight. A longer demo. On the way home we chatted over the pros and cons. I mentioned the possible increased cost of maintenance when my wife pointed out that at least we wouldn’t have to replace the exhaust…

I felt rather foolish. Electric cars have no exhaust… Of course they don’t! They’re electric!

That’s a few hundred pounds we wouldn’t have to shell out every few years…

World building

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My visit to a Nissan dealership today, looking to buy a second hand Leaf – Nissan’s electric car, sparked a whole stream of unasked questions.

How many people work at that dealership? How much profit do they have to make on each car? How many cars do they have to sell to pay the salaries of the people working there?

When I mentioned this to my wife she reminded me that you also have to factor in income through the extras they try and up-sell: Gap Insurance; Scotch-Guard; the regular service packages; the commissions from finance; and of course ongoing maintenance and repairs…

However they manage their business, the impression I get is that running a car dealership is a profitable enterprise. Which implies that for every car sold, new or second hand, for every up-sell, profit is being made.

I’m not against profit – I run my own business at a profit – yet as I compete with other contractors for roles and dealerships compete for our custom, I couldn’t help the thought that we humans have constructed a very inefficient model of economy. Surely there is a better way of organising ourselves…

Of course there have been attempts to organise the human economy, the two notable ones being socialism and fascism. Two philosophies that utterly failed in implementation during the last century, both of which tried to redesign our economy.

At the back of my mind as I wrote my first novel: The Great Scottish Land Grab, I was aware that my protagonist – Robert Castle – was rail-roading his way towards his vision for a utopian Scotland. Several readers commented that Castle was a “bit of a dictator…” I hope a benevolent one, but I agree, I ended up giving Robert Castle an enormous amount of power even as he sought to bring about a more democratic society.

At the time, as I was writing Land Grab, I struggled to imagine a different way for Castle to achieve his objective of reversing the Highland Clearances. It seemed to me that such an upheaval could only be achieved by someone willing to take tremendous risks, to go head to head with those in power and authority and accept the possibility that the threat of violence may be needed.

I enjoy my status as World Builder. So much easier to conceive and implement a new economy or society in fiction than in real life. Real life is much messier and frought with real risk.

I believe we have all been created by God to be creators ourselves. We have been given the tremendous capacity to turn the ordinary, everyday around us into something of greater value.

So why aren’t we all rich?

You probably have seen the “You have two cows” meme giving one possible answer to the question.

If you give two women each a million pounds, at the extreme, after a month, one woman will have turned that money into four million while the other will have squandered it all and have nothing to show for it.

Most of us fall somewhere inside those two extremes.

Think of all that humanity has achieved just in the last couple of centuries.

We have taken an industrial revolution to a technological revolution and seem on a trajectory to do more, better, faster and yet…

Hundreds of millions of people across the globe still live in extreme poverty – defined by The World Bank as living on less than $1.90 a day. On top of this, Water Aid estimates that 663 million people live without clean water and a massive 2.4 billion don’t have access to adequate sanitation!

We are all world builders. We’re building the world around us day in and day out. One day I believe we will all have to answer a very simple question: What kind of world did we build around us? One that shared and helped and lifted up or one that excluded and trapped and held down.