Nissan Leaf

One of the things that Dave Simmer got us to think about in sizing our system was what kind of car we might get sometime. He pointed out that as owners of two elderly Prius hybrids, our next car would very likely be a plug-in of some sort, and hence sizing the system beyond our current usage (pun intended) made a lot of sense. Not only would we charge our next car for free, but we'd also be generating more SRECs in the process. Sounded good, and that's what we did.

I had visited an old friend of mine in Palo Alto and had admired his new Nissan Leaf. I looked into those here and found that they are very pleasant to drive, and make a great commuter car.

Given that both of the Priuses were around 90K miles old, it seemed like a good time to sell one of them. In fact we were able to do so on Craigslist in a day!

So we took delivery of the Leaf a couple of days later, and voila! Had to charge it on house current for the first couple of weeks until the 240v charge station got installed, but even that worked fine.

I stuffed my bike in the back and took the Leaf out to Lancaster, MA, where the internet had informed me there was a charging station behind the town hall. I found the charger there, as advertised, and plugged in before taking a nice ride down to Clinton and around Wachusett Reservoir. And apparently by law in Massachusetts public charging stations cannot charge you for the electricity they provide. How cool is that?

Here are shots of the charging station we installed in our garage, as well as a few of the Leaf.

Bike fits in the back, wheel on!

Public charging station in Lancaster.