Monday, June 29, 2015

Living the life electric - part 2.

(This post follows from last week's - best read that first if you missed it).
So $9,100 for a 2013 Nissan LEAF SV with 18,000 miles on it, loaded with the premium package. Great deal, but I'm not a car dealer. That's where my friend comes in. He IS a dealer - he owns a small business selling used cars, mostly luxury marques, but it means he's connected. He was curious about LEAFs so he offered to grab the red one from the auction and give me first refusal. (As it happened he also picked up a silver one that he was going to re-sell, but has now ended up keeping as his own car.)
So we went for a test drive in it. The idea was to replace our second car - a Toyota Yaris that is lucky if it does 10 miles a day. From that point of view, a pure electric with an 85 mile range is perfect. It's never going to do a road trip but as a city car it would work perfectly. I drove it - loved it. My wife drove it - loved it. So we pulled the trigger.
The best thing about a dealer friend is that wonderful things can happen. In my case, he bought the car at auction, imported it into the state, paid the auction fees and sold it to me for cost. What does that mean? It means we paid just shy of $10,500. Go look on any of the used car price guides and you'll see the price for this car varies from $12,400 to $15,800 depending on where you buy it used. As the saying goes, it's not what you know, it's who you know.
Next week: living with it.