›› Eric Swanson
If you’ve been thinking of getting an electric car, but aren’t sure if you can afford your own, I might have a solution for you.
My wife Shannon and I bought an all-electric Nissan Leaf in January, and we’re looking to share it with a fellow Fernwoodian.
Here’s the backstory: we love Vancouver Island’s mountains and beaches, but we hated that getting out into nature—in our old diesel wagon—created pollution.
Reports suggest that Vancouver Island’s glaciers could be gone in 20 years.
When we go into the mountains, we don’t want to have contributed to our local glaciers disappearing.
Likewise, the ocean that surrounds us is acidifying. When we go surfing, we don’t want to have made it more acidic.
The obvious solution: an electric car.
Like most electric newbies, we were initially obsessed with range. We thought we needed something comparable to a normal car (400 km+), and so we had ruled out the cheaper Nissan Leaf as a solution to our problem.
Turns out, when we took a 2013 Leaf on a long-distance test drive up to Courtenay and Mt. Washington, we realized “Oh, it’s just a different way to travel.”
You’re forced to slow down and enjoy the scenery and local shops while you charge the thing.
It’s pretty chill, really. So we said scr*w it, put 0% down, and bought a 2016 Nissan Leaf.
It’s awesome, but because we work full-time, the car lives out most of its existence as an expensive driveway ornament.
So if you’ve been thinking of pulling the trigger on an electric car, but you don’t necessarily need or want your own, consider coming over for a coffee/tea to test out the car and chat options.
You can learn more, including the kinds of trips we’ve taken with it, at mountaincar.ca. You can email me at eric.swanson@ubc.ca.
