Turning over a new LEAF

 Our daily driver, Sean's Taurus Police Interceptor, decided to bite the bullet. It went in for some recall work to the dealership and they informed us that the water pump went out. It's quite the job to replace the water pump in that particular engine and Sean was on the fence as to whether he even wanted to do the job himself. He started taking the engine apart and found that the turbos were also failing and would need to be replaced. He then started poking around the catalytic converters and discovered they were there but the honeycomb interiors had been removed and thus we were left with just the shell. It was strange but all of this explained the unburnt fuel smell that the car had been giving off. 

After a few weeks of working on it, Sean decided he wasn't up for the job and sold the car to a guy that was willing to put the work and money into it. We are happy to be out from under that project. It did leave us without our main kid hauler. We take our kids plus Jessica's two oldest kids to school each day and bring them home. We started using the Toyota Tundra as our daily driver and quickly realized it too big and too much of a gas guzzler for that job so we started our hunt for a new (used) car. 

We thought an electric car would be perfect for the 5 mile drive back and forth to school and the random trip to town each week. We spent several weeks car shopping and finally decided a Nissan LEAF would be just about perfect for our needs. One showed up several hours away so we hopped in the truck (with the three dogs) and drove up with the trailer to retrieve it last Saturday. 

 The dogs haven't all been in the car together for a long drive and were quite anxious. I'm pretty sure they thought they were going to the vet or groomer and never really calmed down until the drive home. Beanie, the littlest Boston Terrier, had horrendous gas the entire drive and then to top it all off she threw up. Poor girl is not a very good travel dog. It was a memorable experience though. 

 The LEAF we were going to see turned out to be a very well kept 2013 with 60K miles and still 11 out of 12 bars on the battery (the batteries degrade over time and the bars go down, this one still has 11 meaning it's been well maintained). At 80% charge it has a 65 mile range which will do about 90% of our driving needs. We have other cars that we will use for longer distance driving. 

We are excited to putter around town and not use any gasoline!