Here in the US, used Nissan Leafs run around $10K. We don't have much call for another car right now (our main car is a plug-in hybrid Chrysler minivan), but if we did, this would be a likely candidate.
I see endless Leafs for sale (the older original ones) for only $5k. Granted their batteries are pretty degraded and I'm sure only gets 60 miles of range when blasting AC or heater.
Actually a lot less, more like 30 miles. Worse if it's cold, hot or uphill. I've owned a couple of leafs.
The problem is kind of interesting - a smaller battery in and of itself is painful but there's a deeper problem. YOu have to spread the charge cycle over the whole battery and you have to do more charge cycles. So a Tesla can discharge different cells each day, and any individual cell gets used less frequently. With the leaf, you're using every cell, every day. So it's compounding and much worse than people realize, forgetting all the other problems like no thermal control on the pack.
I actually loved my leafs (leaves?) but they couldn't even get to the city and back very quickly (I mean after 6 months the battery loses a bar). The newer ones are betterish.
It looks like a battery pack replacement with a new battery pack would run around $6K including labor. Assuming the body is fine, that's not too bad of a deal to add onto a cheap Leaf.
30 miles is what we get on a charge with our plugin hybrid minivan before it switches to gas. The last time we bought gas was 28 Feb. It tends to prefer gas in the winter which is a big part of why we bought gas then (looking back over the records, we normally buy a tank of gas once a month in the winter and maybe one more sometime in the summer unless we take a road trip).
I don't think I'd ever get a plug in hybrid - most of the appeal to electric cars for me in the lack of maintenance and lack of things to break. Adding batteries to a gas car just seems like it's doubling the amount that can go wrong and makes the repairs much more expensive.
All I see here are two percentages and a happy face and a sad face. It doesn't really have anything compelling for me to see. And if I'm more likely to need to get a model 3 serviced for something like a panel gap, I'd gladly take that over the risk of total ICE failure on a Toyota. The website says nothing about the severity of the problems, and it's really just the severe ones I care about.
The plug-in hybrid is the non-plug-in hybrid with a bigger battery and an external charger. Before Toyota released their first plug-in model, this was a popular DIY hack. We had our non-plug-in Prius for ten years without a single problem before we sold it and bought the Pacifica. You're imagining an issue that doesn't exist. It's not some exotic technology, it's something that's been on the road for over two decades in its modern incarnation and has roots that extend back to the 19th century.
ICEs have a track record of decades of catastrophic failures due to major component failure. Water pumps, timing belts, gasket leaks, fuel contamination, the list goes on. I've only ever seen a few catastrophic Tesla failures and only because literally every single time it happens it makes the news. Your single data point doesn't mean a whole lot. I realize this comes across as abrasive but I don't meant for it to. Just being conversational
Total drive train failures are far more common on Tesla cars than on Toyota plug-in hybrids. You have a badly skewed misunderstanding of the actual risks.
It's really not that different from a standard hybrid, other than the additional batteries and external charging mechanism. Hybrid technology is over 20 years old now and is no less reliable than a pure internal combustion engine. The plugin has the additional advantage over an EV of eliminating range anxiety since we know that we can always revert to gasoline mode. We have the first model year of the Pacifica hybrid and while there have been a few recalls, I don't think it's been any more than we had with, e.g., our Mazda 626 or our Prius.
