At This Price, Nissan Just May As Well Pay You For a New Leaf
I live at the crossroads of liberal and libertarian. Despite what some of you have said, I’m not Marxist (although I have read plenty of his work, along with Ayn Rand and Adam Smith, Milton Friedman followers, et al.) and economics for me qualifies as a hobby.
Therefore, the economy of how Colorado just made the Nissan Leaf one of the least expensive new cars in America is fascinating.
Right now, Leaf buyers in Colorado can receive the following perks: a $7,500 federal rebate, around $5,000 back from the state of Colorado, and $5,000 from Nissan if you finance your purchase through them. (Georgia, West Virginia and Connecticut are pretty high as well.)
All told, that’s $17,500 back in Colorado on a car that starts at $29,860 ($850 destination included) and your price — before negotiations with the dealer — is $12,360, if your shirt is starched, teeth are white and you max out rebates.
I called up a local Nissan dealer to confirm the details and after a little bit of checking (and a lot of trying to sell me on a lease) she confirmed I could score a Nissan for severely cheap.
FYI: A Mitsubishi Mirage starts at $12,995.
The financing rebate ends at the end of August, and Colorado’s $6,000 incentive (which is the highest in the nation) can’t last forever.
More by Aaron Cole
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Whats so funny and the reason also that I dont like them anymore is that Truecar states that I can get one with their lead for 37600 bucks..hahahahah...Truecar needs to just shut down. I prefer them before they got took to the woodshed by the dealers.
It's been years since I slogged through The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital and to this day, I'm still not totally convinced that Marx was really serious about any of it. I really got the sense that he was just mad at the world and that his writings were nothing more than the ravings of an impoverished academic who felt the world owed him a good life because he was just so smart. God knows he had no fucking idea what he was talking about.
THAT is a killer deal! I'd be tempted to take it if I lived in CO, but I'm in NM. I drove a BMW i3, an even uglier electric car than the leaf, and with similar performance, and loved the responsiveness. It's significantly slower than my 335i, but around town the instant responsiveness makes it almost comparable. Little electrics like this are great transportation appliances, and then I can have something like a big F-150 or Acura MDX in the garage for road trips. Right now I have a 335i and, while I LOVE that car and am always happy to walk up to it, I just can't use most of the performance day to day in my city commute. It'll also be expensive to maintain when I cross 100k in a few years, I have to slow down on a couple of bad intersections to not bottom out, and it gets about 21mpg on premium. Gas is cheap now so that's no biggie, but this won't always be the case. A cheap little short-range electric would in many ways be better for daily driving (I typically only go 25 miles per day...double that if I go mountain biking after work). The downside is they didn't properly cool the battery, which is a killer for longevity of this expensive piece. Penny wise, pound foolish. It makes the car depreciate too fast. Perhaps in a couple years there'll be an affordable aftermarket pack with a proper cooling system. Until then, even at this price, it might make more sense to pay twice as much and get a Prius, which'll go 200k no problem.
"(Georgia, West Virginia and Connecticut are pretty high as well.)" If by "pretty high" you mean "none" in the case of Connecticut. At least not in the page you linked.