Test Drive with Nik Miles – 2022 Nissan Leaf

Join Nik Miles as he goes over the ins and outs of the new 2022 Nissan Leaf. Nik takes us on a test drive and tells us about all the newest upgrades, how the car feels while driving, and gives us an honest review of the vehicle.

After the video make sure to check out our amazing selection of Nissan Leafs at our dealership on McLoughlin in Portland.

2022 Nissan Leaf inventory

Transcription:

I’m Nik Miles and we are at Dick Hannah Nissan on McLoughlin and today I want to show you this. This is the 2022 Nissan Leaf Plus. There are two kinds for 2022. The MSRP comes down, the standard equipment goes up. We’re going to put it on the road, drive it, show you the outside and the inside, and find out all about this brand-new Leaf.

When you drive an electric car it’s a little bit eerie because there is absolutely no sound, it’s silent, unlike a gasoline vehicle. And it’s a little bit like your home train set because when you dial it up, the more you push the gas pedal, the faster the vehicle goes. There are actually no gears in this vehicle. The smaller version gets around 147 horsepower and does about 149 miles on a single charge of electricity. The Leaf Plus does up to 226 miles on a single charge and it depends on how you have it equipped. And they’re a lot of fun to drive, especially since the acceleration happens very quickly. You can just zip through traffic by putting your foot down. It’s very much like driving a go-cart in a sense because it’s easy to get around.

Now charging up your Leaf is very easy. You can either do it with a home charger or a public charging system, and that means you can charge it somewhere like a shopping mall, grocery store, or there are various public chargers available at workplaces as well.

Now, this also has Pro Pilot Assist which is Intelligent Cruise Control, and Nissan Steering Assist. This vehicle comes standard with that feature as well. Now another feature that this vehicle has is the e-pedal and what the e-pedal does is take the accelerator and combine the brake with it, so you don’t have to brake unless it’s an emergency. When you want to slow down, you just take your foot off of the accelerator, and rather than coasting what the vehicle does is actually slows down much faster and it uses the energy that would normally be lost in coasting and puts it straight back into the battery, therefore, reclaiming a lot of that energy and using the brake system as a generator to recapture lost energy.

Now let’s talk about the interior. For 2022 there is a standard eight-way drivers’ adjustable seat. That is new for 2022. Also, 2022 models get a standard electric parking brake and also Nissan has installed a rear door alert system and that is very useful because what that does is when you park the car if you have left something in the back seat it reminds you to check the back seat when exiting the vehicle and that means if there’s ice cream sitting there on a hot sunny day it doesn’t melt all over the back seat. Plus, you want to take everything out of the back seat anytime you exit anyway.

So, let’s talk about how the interior is laid out. Nice materials, it looks nice just to look at. There is a good layout inside this vehicle as well. Steering wheel controls, of course, they have good buttons on the steering wheel. You have your cruise control, voice activation on the right-hand side of the steering wheel, speaker, and then scroll menu controls. Then in front of the driver a large TFT screen on the left, and then the tachometer on the right, so you can see your speed and also some of your power generation information right in the middle of that. On the right-hand side is your infotainment screen which is a full-color touch screen as well. Very useful information on this. You can go through the menu buttons on the right and the left including a backup camera which is useful and, of course, is in every vehicle by law since 2015.

Now Nissan also includes door-to-door navigation which is really useful which means that when you send information to the car about your navigation through Nissan Connect, the app, it means that it doesn’t just take you somewhere from A to B in the car but it’ll tell you how to get the final stages to somewhere if your car isn’t able to get there and show you the last mile as it were how to get there on foot or by another form of transportation where cars can’t actually access it which is very clever.

And then Nissan Connect, which is another great piece of application software that Nissan use and that allows you to connect to your vehicle by your home smart speaker and get your vehicle’s information also how much it’s charged, you can pre-heat your vehicle, cool your vehicle, and connect with it to find out all the information about your vehicle from your smart speaker or via your phone. Of course, all the usual software like Apple CarPlay is embedded in the infotainment screen, which is an 8-inch screen and absolutely sharp as a pin because you can scroll, and you can touch everything you need to. It gives you a link to weather, traffic, sports scores, and fuel prices, and it is, of course, connected to the cloud to give you all the latest information thanks to Nissan’s latest information technology systems.

Now Nissan has built a system called Safety Shield 360 and that Safety Shield 360 actually protects the car 360 degrees around you, and that is all of the systems that everybody wants in their vehicle. And those systems include Forward Emergency Braking with Collision Alert, Rear Braking, Rear Back-Up Warning with braking, and of course things like Blind Spot Warning and all the other things that you’d expect including Lane Departure Warning as well. The vehicle is protected 360 degrees around you, and all this is included as standard on the new 2022 Nissan Leaf.

For 2022 the Nissan Leaf comes in eight different colors. And of course, you can see it’s a Leaf, it has that iconic Leaf design, the Vmotion grille up front as well. The charging port here is at the front which is very different from most electric cars, and it was built very specifically in this place because Nissan didn’t want people to have to bend down and charge the vehicle. So, it’s supposed to be very comfortable and easy to charge right at the front. Now this, of course, comes with their charging cables, they come as part of the Nissan Leaf package, and with the high-capacity charger when you plug this vehicle in you can charge it to 80 percent in just 40 to 45 minutes as well. The Vmotion grille, it has this 3D blue material here, the diamond shapes in the front. They’re a very different look than any other electric car on the market as well.

Standard for 2022 you get the LED headlights and LED daytime running lights. And a very nice front here, with the monochromatic look here, with the sort of headlights going into that v-shaped motion grille at the front as well. Very aerodynamic look, they have the aero wheels as well on the side of the vehicle here, monochromatic mirrors as well with the signal embedded, and a nice-shaped door all the way down the side, chrome door handles, the black surround to the doors, and the floating roof here with the black A, B and C pillars. So, the C pillar is also reflected here as blacked out, and it gives that very aero look when you get to the back of the car here. It sort of has that reflection from the front of the car, the Vmotion grille is reflected here at the back of the vehicle as well. The taillights also have that boomerang shape at the back here that reflects the headlights at the front. And you come round all the way to the back of the vehicle, and again the back is very dynamic and has a great shape.

Now let’s look at the trunk space. So of course, charging cables come here in the back of the vehicle. 23 plus cubic feet is the trunk space, put the back seats down and that goes to over 30 cubic feet. So, let’s sit in the back seats and see how much leg room we have. There is 33 inches of legroom in the back of the 2022 Nissan Leaf, enough room for three people to sit back here which makes this a five-seater. There are two USB ports, two cup holders back here, and it’s comfortable. Of course, zero-gravity seats are what Nissan is famous for. They develop those with NASA, and I would have no problem sitting back here on a long road trip.

If a 2022 Nissan Leaf is in your future come down to Dick Hannah Nissan on McLoughlin, check us out on the web, or give us a ring. We’ll get you into one for a test drive today.