Should I buy or should I lease my Nissan LEAF?

First, this is not going to be a discussion that gets into the nitty-gritty of your financial details requiring spread sheets to keep track of what’s what. It is going to be a high-level overview of your automotive lifestyle and how that comes into play.

How many vehicles have you owned/driven in the last 10 years? (We’re not talking about all of the vehicles in the household. We’re talking about how many have you owned/driven in the last 10 years.) If the answer is three or more, you are likely better off leasing.

The first car I ever owned was a Datsun 240Z. It was a 1973 model which I bought in 1976 from the original owner. I sold it in 1996. The two vehicles in our personal household fleet currently date to 2002 and 2004. We don’t change vehicles often. We will be buying the LEAF.

Keep this in mind – no one knows what the LEAF will be worth in three years. The bank writing the lease on the car pays a lot of people a lot of money to figure these things out. With the LEAF, all they are doing is guessing. If you typically change cars every two to four years, it makes no sense to saddle yourself with the risk of playing “what if”. There aren’t enough (as in currently ZERO) cars out there to make even an educated guess on. Lease the car. If you like it, in three years give Nissan their car back, and get three year newer technology to roll down the road in. That’s why you are always in new cars now – you like the latest and greatest.

Our newest vehicle is six years old. It has almost 90,000 miles on it. That’s the one we’ll keep and give up the eight year old (with only 30,000 miles on it – different driving habits). The LEAF will become our primary vehicle and it will probably be in the family for years. Nissan has already offered an 8 year warranty on the battery. Likely that will include the electric motor (our guess). It is highly likely that we will drive the LEAF for well over 100,000 miles. Will we need to replace the battery? I don’t know. But with the type of driving foreseen, even a signicantly reduced capacity battery will serve our purposes, because we will have another vehicle for longer trips. Eventually the answer to that will be yes – if we keep the car long enough. We suspect that battery pricing for EV batteries will be lower ten to twelve years from now, just as hybrid batteries are less expensive today than they were ten years ago.

The tough decision is the one to be made by those of you that don’t trade every three years, but don’t keep your cars as long as we do. If you generally keep a car four to six years, what do you do? We would buy the LEAF. Why? Because the current lease is for 36 months. So in three years you have to make a decision. Turn it in or buy it. The problem is no one knows what that residual will be three years out. At least not yet. The advantage of buying is that it puts you in the driver’s seat in three years – not the bank. If you are fortunate enough to be able to use the entire $7,500 federal tax credit, that puts you that much ahead of the game. Maybe you will really like the LEAF and decide to keep it. But if you decide to sell it, will there still be a rebate to those new buyers available? That depends on how well Nissan markets the car and how well it is accepted in the marketplace. The more cars sold, the faster the rebate comes to an end. Once 200,000 LEAFs are sold the rebate will be phased out. This could increase the relative value of your LEAF at that point in time, as the actual price paid for a new LEAF starts increasing. A crystal ball would sure be useful right around now.