r/leaf•
Gangstastick

Looking to buy a 2016+ Leaf, any gotchas to look out for?

I'll be working in a town in the UK for the next 2 years at a job that requies me to have a car. The distances to be driven are really short. I estimated no more than 5miles round trip per day at most. On the average, should be half that. If I ever take long distance trips, it should be no more than once in 6 months and I might not even need the car for those. So basically a car for running around a small city/town. Winters here are really mild (last year, it only snowed once), and summers are also quite mild as well.

I have never owned an EV but have always wanted to get one and now that I need a car, I can't help but think, why not get one right now. I'm only going to need it for 2 years at most and after that, I don't really care what happens to the car. So I've carved out a budget of about 4,000 GBP for this car,.

I see a lot of Nissan Leafs listed on autotrader.co.uk for around that budget, and filtering out the older cars, there are a few 2016 model year cars and newer. Mileages are pretty low (compared to most ICE cars i see), so around 60 to 80k. So looks like I can get a less than 10 year old electric car with not too much mileage on it for my budget.

So my question is, what should I be looking for?

I looked at this guide, but it doesn't say anything about cars after 2015, so I am left wondering if there's anything else I should be looking out for after battery capacity (are Leaf's in the UK covered by some sort of warranty if they battery capacity has dropped below a certain threshold?). support for DC fast charging, 6.6KW onboard charging and heat pumps.

Posted Sep 28, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

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