Should we get a 2014?

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cdysthe

Active member
Joined
Sep 17, 2017
Messages
41
Location
Gloucester, MA
Hi,

We've been looking for an iMiev for a while but they have slipped away or been too far away for us to be able to buy them. Now our local CarMax has one. It's a 2014 with nearly 30K miles on it for $5990. CarMax is where we have gotten all our vehicles over the last few years so we feel comfortable buying from them. They also give us a great trade in for our older car. We have already decided on an iMiev. It is perfect for our use as a popping around town vehicle. For longer trips we have our trusty Outlander GT. Our main worry is the 30K miles. The car looks perfect and nearly new, but those 30K miles make me worry a bit. I have no experience with EV's and do not know what 30K miles does to a battery. Should we get this (blue) 2014, or keep looking? The CarMax warranties are good, but I do not know how their translate to an EV.

Any advice greatly appreciated. Happy Holidays btw! :)
 
The battery is warranted against failure for 10 years or 100K miles, so getting a 2014 gives you a couple extra years of warranty vs buying a 2012. How the battery holds up has proven to be pretty much a non-issue. Failures are pretty rare and Mitsu has been great about getting the car fixed at no charge

Since this one is local to you and the price is very good for the year/miles, I would say "Go for it!" . . . . before another one slips away

Don
 
Go for it.

After owning an i-miev for four years I would not hesitate to buy a used ev that was in good shape.

Pete
 
You guys won't believe what happened. They hadn't charged it and I do not know how to check that yet. Just assumed it was charged. It died on an icy freeway in Massachusetts after 10 miles . Still 8 miles to go. Police came to protect us from plows. CarMax had to send a tow truck which took us home with the new car. Charging now. What a way to start our EV/IMiEV experience!

Only way now is up! Merry Christmas!

I'll be back with a million questions :)
 
OMG! :eek:

First of all, good that you plugged it in immediately.

You have two gauges on the dashboard that would have given you plenty of advance warning:

Fuel gauge, on the left side of the instrument panel. It shows battery charge level in sixteen bar increments. One bar gives you roughly four miles of range.

Range Remaining, on the right side of the instrument panel. You need to push the little selector button until a number with a left-facing horizontal arrow under it shows up. This predicts the number of miles you can drive, based on battery charge level and how the car was driven for the past 15 miles (it's a 15-mile moving average). If your driving is consistent, it is a very reliable predictor.

In practice, I almost never let the charge level get below two bars, and almost never fully charge the car either. We can get into that later. In this case, fully fully charging the car all the way up to the top and letting it eventually turn itself off all in one unbroken charging cycle will actually be good as it will ensure that the individual cells will be balanced and it will perform an internal recalibration as well, as who knows how long the car has been sitting unused.

Hope you got a good night's sleep. What a traumatic start to your EV ownership. :cry:
 
Thank you so much. That was a great crash course in how to stay in power so to speak.

We live in Massachusetts but I'm a Norwegian so I'm very used to have EVs all around me when I visit there, There's iMiEV's everywhere you turn and both my sister and brother has one. It's just that they were never mine. I just borrowed one to go to the store or to my office over there. CarMax didn't seem very well informed or prepared either and we were tired and wanted to get the thing home for Christmas.

CarMax knocked off another $500 after this happened and my wife and I had a romantic adventure in the dark on the freeway waiting to be rescued. We love our little blue battery car even more now after we had to rescue it :)

My teenage son's comment when we came home in the ice storm on a tow truck was: "I knew it!". He is learning to drive and it's not exactly what he wants to show his friends. I told him the girls will flock to you when you show up in the iMiEV. He was not convinced.

Interestingly enough driving from the dealership is probably the longest trip the iMiEV will take with us. From now on it's only to school, grocery store and to the beaches around Gloucester with a free parking and charge outside city hall now and then :)

My 7 year has daugher has named it "The Kitten Car". No way to change that now :)
 
cdysthe, you've had your i-MiEV for over a month and been subjected to some of the most horrific winter weather as a cruel initiation into your i-MiEV ownership experience. Just curious how the i-MiEV is working out for you?
 
The iMiev is working out great. When it gets really cold it loses some range and it doesn't get warm as fast as gas cars do. Before we got it we had defined pretty narrowly what we will use it for and what the limitations would be. But since it is a "around town" car for us we haven't found much to dislike. It even digs itself through some snow and behaves nicely on slippery winter roads. Since it's rear wheel drive it behaves a little differently from what we are used to but it gets to from A to B in rain, ice, blizzards, fog and cold. The preheat options using the remote is great! I start that when I get up in the morning so the car is ice free and relatively warm by the time I take kids to school. There are charging options in the towns we go to, mainly Ipswich and Gloucester here in MA so we do not get to experience real range angst even. My wife took the car to the goat farm she works at from time to time up in Newburyport. That got pretty close to no bars when home again but it all went fine.

Love in the iMiev and not having a car loan to pay off :)
 
Last night we took it to the one bar charge level by going to a restaurant quite far away. No range angst since we know how far we can go and had the running out of power experience on our first night with the car taking it home from the dealer (described elsewhere in the forums). That experience taught us that you've got quite a few miles after the bars are gone and the turtle shakes it's ugly head and you ultimately have to pull over.. The trip last night is as far as we would take he iMiev and contains quite a bit of uphill freeway going home. It struck me that range angst is very much based on the fact that there's no spare gasoline tank in the back and you can't walk to the nearest gas station for help either. You are instantly tow truck material. I wish there was a "spare tank" device available for EV's :)

The food at the restaurant was good and there were people at the parking lot asking me about the iMiEV thinking it was some sort of prototype. Not many of them around here.
 
cdysthe,, delighted the i-MiEV is working out well for you! Excellent that you assessed your real needs before you bought the car.

cdysthe, turtle is your 'spare gas tank'. Note that as the battery ages and loses capacity, this invisible reserve is reduced, with little apparent affect on your car's range.

We have a saying on this forum: range is whatever we want it to be. Our driving style is the primary determinant of how far we can go with a given battery pack. Freeway speed is a range-killer, so stick to the right lane and slow down early-on if there is any question at all.

In six years of i-MiEV daily driving, neither my wife nor I have ever seen turtle, and rarely arrive home with fewer than two bars.

Winter driving:

1) In addition to reduced range due to low temperature decreased battery capacity and heater use, need to recognize that driving on a wet, slushy, or snow-covered road surface significantly increases the car's rolling resistance.

2) For getting out of snow-stuck situations, in your bag of tricks don't forget that you have the ASC (Active Stability Control) switch (by your left knee) that you can disable - be sure to hold it pushed in for at least a second. See your manual. Perhaps some of our snow experts can comment on this?
 
Getting stuck? Ain’t gonna happen! I mudded through an absolute bog of a school construction site yesterday. One of the grizzled workers actually scoffed that “something don’t belong here” when I pulled up to check progress. So of course I did a lap of the unimproved site. Awesome mud traction with them 175 mm snow tires!
 
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