The Cost of Owning a Car: A Nissan Leaf's Value Proposition

The cost of owning a car can be broken down into several components, including the lease, gas, and maintenance costs. The Nissan Leaf is an electric vehicle that offers a unique value proposition to its owners. In this article, we'll explore how the cost of owning a Nissan Leaf compares to other vehicles, and what it means for drivers.

The Electric Cost Per Month

One key aspect of the Nissan Leaf's value proposition is the cost per mile. The electric cost per month is $230, which includes the lease plus 4 cents for every mile driven in that month. This means that if you drive a lot, your costs can add up quickly. However, if you have a low mileage, the cost per month can be significantly lower.

Assuming no payment on the vehicle, the gas cost is simply the amount of money needed to cover the fuel costs for the car. The cost per mile times the number of miles driven in a month will give you your total cost per month. This simple calculation provides a straightforward way to understand the economics of owning an electric vehicle.

Setting Up Equations

To determine how many miles you need to drive each month to make the Nissan Leaf free or essentially free, we can set up two equations and solve for the mileage required. The first equation is 230 plus the miles per month times 4 cents, which should be equal to the miles driven in a month divided by your current car's mile per gallon.

Moving all this over to the other side of the equation gives us the miles per month that you need to drive in order for the Nissan Leaf to be free or essentially free. This is calculated as 230 divided by 4 divided by your current car's mile per gallon minus 4 cents per mile for the electric vehicle.

For example, let's assume our current car gets 20 miles per gallon. We can plug this value into the equation to get an idea of how many miles you need to drive each month to make the Nissan Leaf free or essentially free. This gives us a rough estimate of 230 divided by 4 divided by 20 minus 4 cents, which works out to around 47 miles per day.

Converting Miles Per Month to Days

To put this into perspective, most people know how many miles they drive in a day rather than in a month. To convert our calculation from miles per month to days, we can divide the total number of miles by the number of days in the month. With 365 days in a year and 12 months in a year, this works out to around 47 miles per day.

What This Means for Drivers

If you drive more than 47 miles per day, then purchasing a Nissan Leaf could be an attractive option. The car would essentially be free or low-cost, with the only additional expense being gas. However, if your mileage is lower, this value proposition may not apply as strongly.

It's also worth noting that the Nissan Leaf has a limited range of around 75-80 miles per charge. This means that you'll need to charge your car once per day, and plan accordingly to avoid running out of battery power during the day.

The Graphical Representation

To give you a better idea of how this works in practice, we can look at a graphical representation of the minimum miles per day required for the Nissan Leaf to be free or essentially free. This graph shows us the optimum zone where you would only need to charge your car once per day and still be getting the car for free.

By comparing this to our current mileage, we can see if it's feasible for us to make the switch to an electric vehicle. The leaf doesn't have an unlimited range, so we need to consider this limitation when deciding whether or not to purchase one.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome to this week's video today I'm going to be explaining how you can have a car basically for free now of course nothing is truly free but what I'm going to describe in this video is how you could have a Nissan Leaf or a different electric vehicle depending on its cost at no additional cost to what you're already paying so let me explain how this works and basically it all comes down to one very simple equation uh the monthly cost of the electric vehicle or the lease payment divided by uh in parenthesis here we've got the cost per mile of gasoline uh of your current car minus the cost per mile of electricity for uh your electric vehicle divide that by the days in a year divided by 12 that'll make this into um this will give you an output of miles per day and so what that miles per day is telling you is say this number is 50 well if you drive more than 50 miles in a day then you could potentially pay nothing extra by buying a Nissan Leaf than using your current vehicle so let me explain how this works okay first off our assumptions step one uh a Nissan Leaf I looked up some prices around the area and basically I didn't go with the lowest possible price but a a reasonable price so we've got $36,000 or $3,600 down and $80 a month and this lease is for 24 months so if you do do 80 + 3600 / 24 to get that into a monthly payment basically this is going to be a total cost of $230 per month now this is the Nissan Leaf SV so the middle class one so it is going to be a little bit more expensive than the cheapest version which means at the end of the day um you could do even better than what I describe in this video okay we're going to go with the assumption that gas is $4 per gallon which could be high for some of you it could be low for some of you so regardless uh that variable could change and you could do the math uh for yourself if you want to change that a little bit electricity 11 cents per kilowatt hour also kind of a high estimate for me but for some people that may be uh too cheap so the first thing we need is the cost per mile uh of the gasoline car this is extremely simple to obtain you know what the cost per gallon is you just look at a gas station and it says it in huge numbers um so we're going with $4 a gallon and you probably know what your m per gallon are for your vehicle so if not you can just look at an EPA rating and find that out so the cost per mile of a 20 MP gallon vehicle 4 / 20 20 cents per mile okay 20 m per gallon isn't that great but it is a reality today so anyways step three we need the cost per mile of the electric vehicle and this is a little bit more complicated than simply the gas car so basically what you need to do is find out the cost to charge the entire vehicle and its range you divide that cost of the charge divided by its range and that will give you the cost per mile so the cost to charge uh a Nissan Leaf well we've got 11 cents per kilowatt hour the Nissan Leaf has a 24 kwatt hour battery and we're going to assume that the charging occurs with 90% efficiency so 90% of the energy put into charging that battery is actually successfully charging that battery so 11 * 24 divid 90 that gives us $2.90 to charge the vehicle which is pretty awesome when you think about it just $3 to fill up your your Nissan Leaf um the range is about 75 miles so 293 divid 75 you have a cost per mile of about 4 cents okay here's where we get to the fun part cost per month okay so you the electric cost per month is going to be $230 uh that's your lease plus 4 cents for every mile you drive in that month your gas cost is going to be assuming that you have no payment that's how uh we get this vehicle to be free is the fact that you're only paying for gas that's the only difference you're not paying for your car payment because if we included a car payment uh an electric car would come out way ahead and that's not really what we're trying to figure out we're trying to figure out how you can get a car for no additional cost okay so cost per mile times the number of miles you drive in a month and that will give you your cost per month very simple all right so let's set these two equations equal okay and what that will do is give us the miles uh per month that we have to drive in order for uh the Nissan leave value proposition to work out so 230 plus the miles per month time 4 cents equal to Miles you driv in a month divided by your current $4 divided by your current car's mile per gallon okay so we're going to move all this over to the other side so that's going to give us 230 equals the miles per month times this uh this here minus this here all right great so the miles per month that we have to drive in order to have this car be free no additional cost 230 divided by so we're just going to move this over here 230 divided by four divided by your current cars mile per gallon minus 4 cents uh per mile for the electric vehicle okay so if you plug in the current mile per gallon for your car this will give you the miles in a month that you drive and so what we do here is we're going to go with our example of 20 m per gallon so if your car gets 20 m per gallon you plug that in there the miles per month you need to drive is equal to 230 /2- 04 we're going to convert this into miles per day because most people probably know how many miles they drive in a day they may not know how many miles they drive in a month so miles per day you just take this number the miles per month and divided by the number of days in a month so number of days in a month 365 divid by 12 okay so that gives you 47 miles so what that means is if you drive 47 mil or more per day which is a lot granted then if you purchase a Nissan Leaf and you drive those same amount of miles even with the cost of the lease you will not be paying any more per month now one thing to take in mind when using this equation is it assumes you never run out of battery charge so if this number here is greater than 75 and you actually drive greater than 75 well you need to take into consideration that you're going to have to charge that during the day so say this number was 100 well say you have a 50 mile commute to work hopefully not but some people do 50 mil to work you get there you charge your car and you've got 50 mil back well that could work out if you can charge your car while it's at work but you need to keep that in mind uh for your own personal consideration so we're going to look at a graph so you can see where your car lines up and how many miles per day you would have to drive in order for your Nissan Leaf to be no additional cost okay so what we've got here is a graphical representation of the minimum miles per day that you would need to drive in order for the car to be free or essentially free so on the bottom axis we've got the miles per gallon of your current vehicle and on the left hand axis we've got uh the miles that you drive in a single day so this line here represents the cut off line of the minimum miles per day in order for this car to be free or basically no extra cost so if your vehicle for example we did 20 gets uh 20 m per gallon then it's going to be about 47 as you see here miles per day that you need to drive or more in order for it to come at no additional cost now of course the leaf doesn't have an unlimited range it's about 75 to 80 Mi so here when you punch in uh this is basically the optimum Zone where you would only have to charge the car once per day and you would still be getting the car for free if you fall in this category of less than 30 m per gallon and your miles per day are greater than uh this curve right here so you guys can check out this graph kind of point out where your car is and figure out if it's actually something that could be feasible for you to dohello everyone and welcome to this week's video today I'm going to be explaining how you can have a car basically for free now of course nothing is truly free but what I'm going to describe in this video is how you could have a Nissan Leaf or a different electric vehicle depending on its cost at no additional cost to what you're already paying so let me explain how this works and basically it all comes down to one very simple equation uh the monthly cost of the electric vehicle or the lease payment divided by uh in parenthesis here we've got the cost per mile of gasoline uh of your current car minus the cost per mile of electricity for uh your electric vehicle divide that by the days in a year divided by 12 that'll make this into um this will give you an output of miles per day and so what that miles per day is telling you is say this number is 50 well if you drive more than 50 miles in a day then you could potentially pay nothing extra by buying a Nissan Leaf than using your current vehicle so let me explain how this works okay first off our assumptions step one uh a Nissan Leaf I looked up some prices around the area and basically I didn't go with the lowest possible price but a a reasonable price so we've got $36,000 or $3,600 down and $80 a month and this lease is for 24 months so if you do do 80 + 3600 / 24 to get that into a monthly payment basically this is going to be a total cost of $230 per month now this is the Nissan Leaf SV so the middle class one so it is going to be a little bit more expensive than the cheapest version which means at the end of the day um you could do even better than what I describe in this video okay we're going to go with the assumption that gas is $4 per gallon which could be high for some of you it could be low for some of you so regardless uh that variable could change and you could do the math uh for yourself if you want to change that a little bit electricity 11 cents per kilowatt hour also kind of a high estimate for me but for some people that may be uh too cheap so the first thing we need is the cost per mile uh of the gasoline car this is extremely simple to obtain you know what the cost per gallon is you just look at a gas station and it says it in huge numbers um so we're going with $4 a gallon and you probably know what your m per gallon are for your vehicle so if not you can just look at an EPA rating and find that out so the cost per mile of a 20 MP gallon vehicle 4 / 20 20 cents per mile okay 20 m per gallon isn't that great but it is a reality today so anyways step three we need the cost per mile of the electric vehicle and this is a little bit more complicated than simply the gas car so basically what you need to do is find out the cost to charge the entire vehicle and its range you divide that cost of the charge divided by its range and that will give you the cost per mile so the cost to charge uh a Nissan Leaf well we've got 11 cents per kilowatt hour the Nissan Leaf has a 24 kwatt hour battery and we're going to assume that the charging occurs with 90% efficiency so 90% of the energy put into charging that battery is actually successfully charging that battery so 11 * 24 divid 90 that gives us $2.90 to charge the vehicle which is pretty awesome when you think about it just $3 to fill up your your Nissan Leaf um the range is about 75 miles so 293 divid 75 you have a cost per mile of about 4 cents okay here's where we get to the fun part cost per month okay so you the electric cost per month is going to be $230 uh that's your lease plus 4 cents for every mile you drive in that month your gas cost is going to be assuming that you have no payment that's how uh we get this vehicle to be free is the fact that you're only paying for gas that's the only difference you're not paying for your car payment because if we included a car payment uh an electric car would come out way ahead and that's not really what we're trying to figure out we're trying to figure out how you can get a car for no additional cost okay so cost per mile times the number of miles you drive in a month and that will give you your cost per month very simple all right so let's set these two equations equal okay and what that will do is give us the miles uh per month that we have to drive in order for uh the Nissan leave value proposition to work out so 230 plus the miles per month time 4 cents equal to Miles you driv in a month divided by your current $4 divided by your current car's mile per gallon okay so we're going to move all this over to the other side so that's going to give us 230 equals the miles per month times this uh this here minus this here all right great so the miles per month that we have to drive in order to have this car be free no additional cost 230 divided by so we're just going to move this over here 230 divided by four divided by your current cars mile per gallon minus 4 cents uh per mile for the electric vehicle okay so if you plug in the current mile per gallon for your car this will give you the miles in a month that you drive and so what we do here is we're going to go with our example of 20 m per gallon so if your car gets 20 m per gallon you plug that in there the miles per month you need to drive is equal to 230 /2- 04 we're going to convert this into miles per day because most people probably know how many miles they drive in a day they may not know how many miles they drive in a month so miles per day you just take this number the miles per month and divided by the number of days in a month so number of days in a month 365 divid by 12 okay so that gives you 47 miles so what that means is if you drive 47 mil or more per day which is a lot granted then if you purchase a Nissan Leaf and you drive those same amount of miles even with the cost of the lease you will not be paying any more per month now one thing to take in mind when using this equation is it assumes you never run out of battery charge so if this number here is greater than 75 and you actually drive greater than 75 well you need to take into consideration that you're going to have to charge that during the day so say this number was 100 well say you have a 50 mile commute to work hopefully not but some people do 50 mil to work you get there you charge your car and you've got 50 mil back well that could work out if you can charge your car while it's at work but you need to keep that in mind uh for your own personal consideration so we're going to look at a graph so you can see where your car lines up and how many miles per day you would have to drive in order for your Nissan Leaf to be no additional cost okay so what we've got here is a graphical representation of the minimum miles per day that you would need to drive in order for the car to be free or essentially free so on the bottom axis we've got the miles per gallon of your current vehicle and on the left hand axis we've got uh the miles that you drive in a single day so this line here represents the cut off line of the minimum miles per day in order for this car to be free or basically no extra cost so if your vehicle for example we did 20 gets uh 20 m per gallon then it's going to be about 47 as you see here miles per day that you need to drive or more in order for it to come at no additional cost now of course the leaf doesn't have an unlimited range it's about 75 to 80 Mi so here when you punch in uh this is basically the optimum Zone where you would only have to charge the car once per day and you would still be getting the car for free if you fall in this category of less than 30 m per gallon and your miles per day are greater than uh this curve right here so you guys can check out this graph kind of point out where your car is and figure out if it's actually something that could be feasible for you to do\n"