Our First Free Charge

Our Nissan Leaf plugged into the free charging station.

We bought our 2012 Nissan Leaf 2 years ago. Usually we charge the car every night in our garage. It holds 25 kilowatt hours of electricity. Since a KWH costs about 12 cents - that is a total of about $3.00 of power.

Today we went to the mall at about 11 AM for our normal 2 miles of air conditioned walk. After the walk Lulu decided we would have lunch at the Village Inn - a new restaurant near our home and also near the new Home Suites Hotel. To our surprise - there are 3 electric car charging stations there. I plugged the leaf into one - pressed the button - and it started to charge our car. I guess it was okay.

Our car can go about 75 miles on a full charge. We seldom go that far during one day. People say - why would you buy a car that can only go 75 miles. What they don't realize is that most of our trips are much less than 75 miles. In 2 years - I have never gotten closer than 10 miles to running out of power.

People that own electric cars talk about "range fatigue" which simply means you are scared of running out of power. The more you have the car - the less you worry about running out of power. It is a very dependable rig.

Let's see now - $3.00 a day times 30 days equals $90 a month :-)  It looks like we will be eating a lot at the Village Inn.