Nissan to counter early-adopter anxiety

Nissan has given LEAF EV sales a fillip with a tailor-made finance package for the car, and capped-price servicing.

The key to commercial success with new technologies like EVs is financial certainty for buyers. Hence a finance package making Nissan’s LEAF affordable, and capped price servicing making it even more so.

The purchase package’s $599/month payment is designed to make the $50K LEAF at least half way accessible for Nissan’s ultimate target market: Everyman. But while you can bend and squeeze and reshape it, you can’t shrink the price of a $50K new car any more than you can shrink a balloon with a litre of water in it. When the monthly repayments shrink, the money has to come from somewhere else. In the case of the LEAF finance package, to keep your repayments down to $599/month the company asks for a hefty 40 per cent deposit.

That’s 20 big ones, the outright purchase price for more conventional fare of similar size, the base end of the C segment, at least – for example a Hyundai i30 or a Kia Cerato, or Nissan’s own Tiida. Add a couple of thousand dollars and you open up a smorgasbord of big-brand hatches like Golf, Impreza, Focus, Citroen C4, Cruze, Lancer and, of course, those industry staples, Corolla and Mazda3.

Which, really, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, rather elevates LEAF back out of Everyman’s land.

But wait, as they say – there’s more. To help alleviate jitters and trust issues about new technology, Nissan has included a buyback guarantee in the deal. Namely, at the end of your three-year contract term, Nissan will buy the LEAF back. For obvious reasons, the amount for which it will do that is rubbery. After all, you can’t expect an active couple with three children under six to hand back a car in the same nick as the proverbial churchgoing little old lady.

Benchmarking it on the acknowledged average 15,000km driving year, at the end of the 36 months, you can keep and pay out the car or take the buyback option. If you take the latter and your LEAF meets agreed wear and tear guidelines, you can expect Nissan to buy it back for $20,600. That is, you get your deposit back.

Capped-price servicing

So, effectively, you’ve driven the LEAF for three years for $599 a month. That adds up to $21,564. Which, when you consider the petrol that’s not going into it, and the LEAF’s inclusion in Nissan’s capped-price servicing regime for the duration of its three-year warranty, it starts looking like a car that’s going to cost you not a whole lot more than $150 a week.

Servicing prices reflect the LEAF’s mechanical simplicity. The cost of scheduled six-month/10,000km services alternates between $88 and $300. The cheaper ones amount to just a battery check, the costlier ones add a full run through safety systems, undercarriage etc.

The strategy appears to be working. Despite minimal mainstream marketing, the LEAF is attracting plenty of attention, with Sydney dealer Steve Jarvin selling five in the car’s first fortnight on the market.

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