After leaving the country and selling our cars, my wife and I found ourselves back in Texas without a car to our names. We got by borrowing a car for a while, but in 2021 we decided it was time to get our own; not only that, but we needed two, as our jobs were no longer conducive to sharing a car. I knew pretty early on that I wanted one of them to be electric. Although I didn’t know much about them at the time – and there weren’t many in the US market then – it was pretty clear to me that EVs were the future. It didn’t make sense to me to commit to two gas cars, and it seemed like a good time to try out living with an EV.

Early on, my budget was very low. That meant I was really just looking at used Nissan Leafs. I had started looking at them back in 2019 or 2020 and they were very affordable used at the time. If you research used Leafs at all you will quickly see that you need to pay attention to the battery health. The battery is passively cooled (or air cooled), meaning it basically just cools with the air flowing by as you drive. That does not work great when it is sitting baking in the Texas sun. It also can present problems when fast charging, as the battery overheats and cannot be actively cooled, so charging speeds slow. That said, I am not trying to knock Nissan Leafs. I see plenty driving around Texas, so I think the cooling issues are somewhat overblown, and they display the battery health right in the instrument cluster, so it should be easy to see what you are getting. 

However, by the time I got serious about buying my budget had grown a bit; not enough to go wild (without being irresponsible) but enough to open up some other options. So I started shopping…