Victoria's Blog

Leaf 2.Zero 600 miles In

I’ve now had my car for a week and a half and have clocked up 600 miles. It’s been an interesting week since I wrote the last post and there’s a few things I’ve noticed with the car over that time…

The drivers sun visor is seriously small compared to the one I had in my 57 plate KIA cee’d! I drive North in the morning and South on the way home from work, so the sun is always on the right side of my face. The sun visor in the Nissan Leaf 2.Zero is so short when pushed around to the driver’s door side that it doesn’t even reach my forehead and therefore is effectively useless. I’ve had to “Blue Peter” style myself a workaround (a.k.a cut a box apart and stuff it into the sun visor holding strap – see below!).

I tested out the anti-lock braking for an Audi driver on the way home at a roundabout this week… I wasn’t going very fast when the Audi driver decided to try and go across the roundabout in front of me when he shouldn’t have. I’m guessing the ALB kicked in because of the weight of the car and the fact that I put my foot right down on the brake to stop the potential collision that was about to happen.

I got the TCU fixed by the dealer last weekend, but still couldn’t get the NissanConnect website to verify ownership. Sat in my car on three occasions and waited over 10 minutes with the whirley-gig saying checking, but no luck. Ended up emailing NissanConnect on Saturday and had to send them a copy of the V5 inside page but by Wednesday evening they’d verified I owned the vehicle and the service was activated. It’s not the greatest of apps – partly because it’s incredibly slow to send / receive requests from the car – but it’s useful to see remotely how much battery charge the vehicle has left and on the odd occasion switch the heating on.

When I took the vehicle to the dealer at the weekend, I also got them to check the faulty tyre pressure monitor. They reset the monitor from the car dashboard – not exactly what I’d hoped for and I thought it wouldn’t cure it. On the way home the warning re-appeared, so the car has to go back for a new sensor in April.

The adaptive cruise control is incredibly useful – I’ve used it on every journey I’ve made this week. It did take a bit of getting used to. The main thing was wondering why the car was going slowly one morning, only to remember it was matching the speed of the really slow car infront. I have found that on my long journey to and from work, when the cars in cruise control mode there’s nowhere to rest my right foot. The gap between the accelerator and the side of the car is too small to put my foot between. It’s therefore a little uncomfortable when driving for long periods of time on cruise control as I’m not sure where to rest my foot. If I move my leg towards the chair (as if I’m sitting at a table), I feel I’m not close enough to the pedals to react in time if there was a problem.

Scheduling the car to be warm when leaving work is awesome!! Not only is the company paying for my lovely warm car by way of the free electricity, but getting in a car preheated to 23.5C when it’s 5C outside is so nice 🙂

That’s it so far this week, but if I notice anything else in the coming weeks/months – I’ll be sure to put another post up.