Used 2015 Nissan LEAF Consumer Reviews
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Love my Leaf
Orlando, 05/22/2017
updated 11/25/2019
2015 Nissan LEAF S 4dr Hatchback (electric DD)
6 of 6 people found this review helpful
I bought my 2015 Leaf used in November 2016. The purchase price was very affordable even though as a used car it is not eligible for any tax incentives. My commute is 35 miles each way and while I can drive to work and back on a single charge my office parking lot contains EV charging stations. I generally use them for 2 hours because I like to leave work on a full charge in case I want to make side trips on the way home. My main reason for this purchase wasn't the price of gasoline but rather low maintenance. Given that I have 3 other high mileage vehicles, maintenance has always been an issue. This is a no brainer for me. Just unplug and go. In six months I've driven 13,000 trouble free miles. The ride is great and acceleration very brisk. Overall I'm very pleased with this purchase. This is the perfect commuter car for me. After another 36,000 miles since my last review, no issues and no maintenance except tires. Love this car.
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Great for what it is, but obsolesced by newer EVs
Dan W, 07/06/2022
updated 07/20/2023
2015 Nissan LEAF S 4dr Hatchback (electric DD)
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
The obvious overriding constraint with this car is its limited range. It will go 80-100 miles on a charge in warmer weather - or only 50-60 miles in our Minnesota winters. You would not want this as your primary family car, even if you're otherwise okay with a Fit/Sonic/Kona sized vehicle. Where it really shines is if you have a moderate commute and/or mostly do errands within a radius of a few miles. We bought it as a commuter car doing about 1000 miles a month, and it is the cheapest car we could possibly own. By a wide margin. We looked at everything from used Priuses to used economy cars, and nothing came close. We bought a 3-year-old Leaf with 25k on the odometer for a third of what it cost new; admittedly, you would pay more for a used one today, but that's true of all used cars as of 2022. You still pay less upfront than for another car of the same age, and you save even more on energy and maintenance. We've since put another 50k of blissful miles on ours. Despite a soft, forgiving suspension it corners remarkably well. It is luxury-car quiet on the highway, and absolutely library quiet at city speeds. Its acceleration of 0-60 in 10 seconds might not sound quick, but between 10 and 40 mph - city speeds - it will suck you back into your seat. Which is wonderful for around-town driving. You can pick up 10-15 mph almost instantly at any time, with no waiting for a downshift and no dramatic engine roar to draw attention. Part of the reason for the 10 second time is that Nissan deliberately limits power off the line to avoid wheelspin, so under 10 it's not that quick and it starts running out of steam at highway speeds too, but around town it's a blast. It also uses more juice at highway speeds, so anytime you worry about the battery getting low, just pull off the highway and take the side streets. It might seem counterintuitive, but hybrids and EVs get much better mileage in town than on the highway, and that is very true of this car. And that's the biggest limitation of this car: the constant need to think about how much range you've got left, and when and where you're going to charge it. Although we have Level 2 charging it's only 3.3kW, the very low end of Level 2, and it takes 6-8 hours to fully charge the battery from as low as we'd dare let it get. Many Leafs were sold with the optional Quick Charge Package (6.6kW), but it uses the CHaDeMo connector which is rapidly being phased out in favor of CCS. Almost all the EV makers except Tesla are switching to CCS, and Nissan has also gone with CCS on its new Ariya. Yet bizarrely, even though they made significant design changes on the 2023 Leaf they’re sticking with CHaDeMo on that car. Makes no sense, but then again we don’t even have the fast charge on ours. Which, if you can manage the charge time, may be an advantage. It sounds like fast charging is fine if you only use it occasionally for longer trips, but fast charging generates a lot of heat, and the Leaf’s air-cooled battery may be the reason some people who fast-charge a lot of had their battery degraded a bit by 60-80k miles. I’ve heard many stories of batteries this age only charging to 9 or 10 bars instead of 12. Maybe because we can’t quick-charge it, we still charge to 12 bars and a full indicated 100% at 80k. We have noticed no loss of range AT ALL since we bought it. A lot of people are worried about the cost of replacing EV batteries as they age. That’s a concern, but battery prices are in free fall as technology improves, and the Leaf’s 24kWh battery is much smaller than the newer EVs. I could have my battery replaced today for $5k, upgrade to one with 30% more range for $8k. Those prices will continue to drop, and I would be very surprised if it is necessary for most vehicles before 150k miles. Pretty far down on my list of concerns. And by the way, the concern about fast charging is ONLY even an issue on the Leaf: most new EVs, including Nissan’s new Ariya, have liquid-cooled batteries that shouldn’t be degraded by fast charging. Energy costs? We live in MN, which does not have cheap electricity (about 15c/kWh after taxes), and we spend $40 a month to drive it 1000 miles. Even a Prius would cost more than double that, at today’s gas prices, and anything else would cost at least 3-4x as much. Maintenance costs? Only issue has been the brakes: although the regenerative braking on hybrids and EVs means their brakes typically last a lot longer, longtime owners of these cars in snowy/salty climates know that they will rust up after 4-5 years on the road whether they are worn out or not. Last year we spent about $1k having our brakes reconditioned and rustproofed (something the factory doesn’t do), but other than a new set of tires that is the ONLY expense we have incurred. Speaking of winter, this car is fantastic for a 2WD vehicle in ice and snow. It has the weight of a Camry or Accord pushing down on tires the size of the Versa on which it’s based. Skinny tires = great traction. What’s more, the traction control system is far more responsive than is possible with a gas engine. In snow you just put your foot down and let the drivetrain sort it out. No roaring engine or violent wheelspin: the car adjusts power to the motor within fractions of a second depending on the amount of wheelspin, also applying brakes to whichever wheel slips more to ensure that they both the right amount of power at all times. It just works. Like my Mazda, in a tight snowy turn the stability control will bring the back end around slightly, helping tuck the car into the turn with less chance of the front end plowing wide. They might not advertise that their ESC does torque vectoring, but it does. Really great on snowy Minneapolis streets. More about winter: Our Leaf S only has a resistive heater, not the heat pump offered on the more expensive models. The heater sucks a lot of juice (about 3kW by my calculations) and will reduce your range even further than what I mentioned above (which, by the way, is not because of reduced battery performance in the cold per se, but because of the energy used by the internal heater that keeps the battery at optimal temperature). But have our Leaf set to preheat the car on house power before we get in in the morning. So we start out with a full battery in a toasty car prewarmed to about 90 degrees, and even in MN cold that lasts a while when you’ve also got a heated steering wheel and four heated seats (thanks to the Cold Weather Package that is the only option on our base Leaf). We don’t end up using the heater that much. Fortunately AC (or presumably the heat pump, if yours has that option) is a lot less thirsty than the heater. By my calculations the AC only uses about 500-600 watts, and running it only takes 5-10 miles off the range. We use the AC all summer and don’t worry about it. Bottom line: great car to drive around in, as long as you’re okay with not driving it very far, and we’ve saved a fortune. We love it for what it is, but also recognize that for most people’s demands (most families seem to want all their cars to be roadtrip-capable, even if one or two is only used for commuting) it has been made obsolete by the newer EVs with 2-3x the range and anywhere from 7 to 100 times the charging speed. Summer 2023 update: 5.5 years and 65k miles in, still great, no major changes to above, but had to redo the brakes again. One of the downsides of driving in salty winter environment.
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2015 Nissan LEAF for sale near you
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2015 junk
Toby J, 02/02/2022
2015 Nissan LEAF SV 4dr Hatchback (electric DD)
5 of 6 people found this review helpful
Your battery pack Will degrade over time it’s just a matter of time. Ours are failing and Nissan will do nothing to help. Consider yourself warned!
100% Reliability.
Andy, 01/28/2022
2015 Nissan LEAF SL 4dr Hatchback (electric DD)
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
Bought this car in Dec of 2014. Since then I haven't had to do anything besides rotate the tires and add windshield fluid. This car has completely sold me on EVs. It's fast, quiet, reliable, virtually maintenance-free. All my future cars will be electric.
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Our second LEAF
shari, 04/22/2018
2015 Nissan LEAF SV 4dr Hatchback w/Prod. End 7/14 (electric DD)
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
This is our 2nd LEAF that we leased since 2012, and we decided to purchase it! Not only has it been an amazing and well-built car with no service issues, it’s saved us so much $ we can’t even begin to imagine! So easy. Just plug it in when we get home and it’s ready to go in the morning!
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