2020 Nissan Leaf Canada Review | SL Plus Test Drive |

It's crazy to think that this 2020 Nissan LEAF behind me is made out of more recyclable material than one single Lysol wipe. Let's check it out. Have the luxury today of taking out the 2020 Nissan LEAF SL+. With a hefty MSRP of $52,898, it does demand a higher price, but make sure you check with your local government because you can get some rebates in terms of the pricing from your government for buying an electric vehicle. The main question that I always get right when I show people the Nissan LEAF is what's the range per charge? This one being the plus, you get the upgraded battery and extended range. It's 349 kilometers on the 62 kilowatt per hour battery. If you get the upgraded battery, we're going to take a look at the ins and outs of the car. Before we open it up, guys, do not forget to subscribe to my channel, Cars Unlocked. I film videos like this every day. If you're a Nissan owner or you're new to my channel, consider subscribing. As always, ask me the questions in the comments and do that YouTube thing of giving me a thumbs up. Let's check out under the hood. Normally when I talk under the hood, we're talking about the powertrain, what it is. Like I said, this one is a 62 kilowatt hour lithium ion battery. It's going to give you about 214 horsepower and 250 pounds feet of torque. A little bit of an upgrade from the standard LEAF model as this one is the plus. You get the upgraded power plan as well. Most customers aren't really curious about that. They're more curious about how to charge. As you can see, the plug-in outlet is right at the front and they give you the charging inputs here. It comes in actually this little nice leather bag, which stores away in the trunk. Then you can plug in here. You can charge at home. Plugging in at home, you're going to be able to go from 0% to a full charge for about 11 hours. It's kind of like an overnight thing using your Nissan Flow home station. If you want a quicker charge than that, you can go to any of the charging stations at any Nissan dealership or in your city and you can use the fast charging port. When charging at home, they also give you this adapter so you can plug right in here. Normally it comes with this little input here and that's the plug-in to the same outlet that you would plug a dryer in, but they do give you this adapter. It's really hard to see and you can just hook this up there. Very convenient and that way you can plug right into a regular electrical outlet like you would any electric llama or any other electric device. When you're charging on the road, you can probably get a lot quicker of a charge. They say you can go from 0% to 80% in 40 minutes using some of the fast charging stations. That would be one that's at a Nissan dealership. There's a few different types of charging stations. Usually it's about 40 minutes to an hour to get to 80% full and a total of three hours to get from zero to dead. If you're on the road, you need to stop for a quick charge. Stopping at those power stations is going to give you the fastest charging possible. Another positive thing about your charging system is it comes with the Nissan app where you can actually track your battery life and your charging system. There's also a schedule where if you're going to plug it in at home, you can set it to start charging at off-peak hours so that you're not using a big chunk of your electrical bill. Very convenient. It will come on when you set the schedule and it will shut off when the vehicle is fully charged so you're not charging the car during those peak electrical times. It's also good to use your phone to be able to track and you can automatically shut off the charging using your phone so you know a full idea of what's going on with the battery in your Nissan LEAF. It's actually more thorough than a regular gas vehicle. You don't have as much tracking in a regular gas vehicle. It doesn't show you up on your phone how much range you have. With the Nissan LEAF, you can do everything right from your phone which makes it very easy. Nissan has certainly been the leader in the electric vehicle market here with the Nissan LEAF being the top selling electric vehicle in the world and they've really helped consumers reduce their economic footprint by offering the fully electric vehicle. However, you don't sacrifice any style. This one being the SL model, you can see it has very similar curves to the front end. The signature V-Motion grille that Nissan has in all their lineup now is right in the front. This one being the SL, you also get the LED daytime running lights, LED headlights, and fog lights which are down below. They're automatic which is going to come on automatically and don't forget that Nissan Intelligent Mobility. That's something I talk about in a lot of my videos and it does come with the Nissan LEAF. Things like Intelligent Trace Control, Pro Pilot Assist, Active Ride Control, Blind Spot Monitoring, we're going to get to in a second. At the side profile, this one is obviously in the gun metallic gray exterior, one of the most popular colors. Being the SL top model, you're going to get the 17-inch machined finished aluminum alloy rims, so an upgrade from the basic package. You can also see we have our LED turning accents right on the mirror here and then you can see this little bubble which I've talked about in previous videos, that's the Around View Monitor. We're going to check that out when we jump into the vehicle. When we advance to the back, you can see the floating roof look. I also mention that in a lot of vehicles because that's coming pretty standard in most of the Nissan vehicles now that they've adjusted the design to give you that floating roof and then of course we do have the Nissan patented boomerang style taillights which are right in the back. Let's go check out the rear. When we come around to the back, there's a lot of black on the rear of the trunk. You can see the black covers right on our tailgate here, our chrome leaf badging and our zero emissions badging is right on the outside. Rear parking sensors, that's going to help with things like the cross traffic alert and when you're reverse parking and then we do have this nice blue rear bumper accent on the on the back which just continues with kind of the blue theme that's throughout the vehicle on the inside and on the front. Let's unlock this thing and check out the inside because that's really where the car stands out is driving it. One disappointment, it doesn't come with the remote starter. It does have the Nissan Intelligent Key but you don't get the remote starter that you get on the regular Nissans. It's probably got something to do with being battery operated so it's hard to remote start the vehicle. However, you can leave the key in your pocket and push the button on the door and it's going to lock and unlock the door and then it's very easy to get in. You also can't lock the keys in the car. If you put the keys in the car and you go to lock the door, it's not going to let you lock the door and it's going to beep at you so you know, hey the key's still in the car. Let's check out the inside. Right when I open up the vehicle, I'm actually blown away by the interior. The SL, you get the leather appointed seats. It does have this nice blue stitching which gives it quite a high-end look especially with these suede accents that you can see on the seat. It's an eight-way power adjustable driver's seat. Your passenger seat is going to be a manual adjustable but this car is all about the driver. It does give you that Nissan zero gravity seat that I talk about in a lot of my vehicles. Every customer loves it. Very, very comfortable. You should be able to go the full range of the battery and then some without feeling any discomfort in the seat because of that zero gravity. Alright, so let's start this thing up and take it for a spin. Normally when I go on test drives, the first thing that customers want to know is, is the car running? You can tell right now I just started it up and it makes no sound when you start it. You wouldn't even know it's running until I actually put my foot on the gas and take off. It's a very, very quiet motor. That's the advantage of obviously being an electric vehicle. Silence is key. Very quiet. This one being the SL model, it comes with every feature that they offer in the Nissan LEAF. Leather wrapped steering wheel, pro pilot assist which is Nissan semi-autonomous driving so it uses all the technology like the blind spot monitoring, the lane departure assist and all the sensors in the car to keep you centered in the lane and then it uses that intelligent cruise control to keep you a safe distance from the car in front of you so you can really drive semi-autonomously. You can't necessarily take your hands off the wheel but it does do a lot of the driving for you and makes for a more relaxed ride. One thing that Nissan really advertises is this e-pedal so I can really use a full, do a full drive without touching the brake and what that is, is when you activate it right here and you take your foot off the gas, it's going to actually help decelerate for you so there's less braking. It also does the regenerative braking where the braking will take some of that power and keep the battery charged so you're not wasting power when you brake but you can go really far once you get used to it. You can do a lot of driving by just coasting and using the e-pedal so I really like this seven inch vehicle information screen. It keeps you very informed with the vehicle. It has the digital speedometer but it will tell me how many kilometers I need to go before I need to charge, what my battery percentage is, just like your cell phone battery life and it also kind of gives you a track of your usage so you can kind of see if your driving habits are the most efficient or if you want to be more efficient, you can adjust your driving habits. You can use the button like the economy mode which is going to help kind of give you a bit more fuel efficient, I don't want to say fuel efficiency but battery efficiency when you're driving anyway and in combination with the e-pedal you can really go very far on one charge. The infotainment system is a very very large infotainment system similar to what's in like the Nissan Kicks. They have the Nissan Connect services as well. Full-on touchscreen. It's an eight inch touchscreen so you do have lots of functions here. GPS navigation comes on this SL model. You have the door-to-door navigation, you have the Bluetooth, the satellite radio, all those abilities to play your music and then down below here is my heating. So really the loudest part of the engine or of the car sorry is the air conditioner. You can see I've turned it on now and I'm kind of talking over it now. That's really the loudest part. Normally in a car you're talking over the engine and the road noise but that's very minimal. You can see I've turned the heat on here. Automatic temperature control as well which makes it a lot easier to keep the temperature adjusted but I'm gonna shut it off. Nissan did a really good job with reducing road noise. The windshield is a reinforced windshield exclusive to this Leaf that helps make the windshield quieter and they should almost think about putting it in all their vehicles because you really don't hear anything that goes on outside the car. So when I jump in the back for a small hatchback there is still quite a bit of room. This seat is in the position how someone my size would be driving. It's rated at 2,616 litres of interior passenger volume which is about 92 cubic feet. It is a three-seater vehicle. Our battery is right underneath us here which is crazy to think. If you're sitting in the middle it might be a little uncomfortable. There is this solid hump here which might make it hard to sit in the middle as opposed to a flat surface. There's also only one heated seat button so you can turn the heated seat on back here and that's going to heat up the entire seat. So if you have two different passengers that want their butts cold or warm you might have an issue with the heated seats. There's two USB in ports back here as well to help you charge your phone. It's a 60 40 split to fold the seats down if you have those large items and you're doing the Ikea thing you can fold the seats down to make more space. Seven speaker Bose audio sound system. Now this is different than what comes in your Nissan Rogue so to speak. It's your high efficiency Bose audio sound system. So Nissan even put in work to make the upgraded sound system more efficient. So that's very lovely. We also have our blind spot monitor which is going to show up right outside the mirror when someone's in their blind spot. So a lot of good stuff. A lot of technology in the car. The Ford collision system. You have the rear cross traffic alert. Let's check out this around view monitor. So when I put it in reverse you can see that 360 monitor in full effect. It's very easy to park using this camera. There's cameras on all four sides and then you have the guidelines here. I say it's very easy as I miss my lines here but using the camera it's very easy. It does have the rear cross traffic alert and those are my sensors that are beeping at me to help me park. So the rear cross traffic alert will help if someone comes by you another car or a bike and yeah it will notify you that someone's behind you when you use it. In the trunk it does come with 668 litres of cargo volume and then you're going to about 23.6 cubic feet of cargo volume for all of you Americans. However it is taken away by a few things. That charging cable that I mentioned is stored away right in here and it clips on so it doesn't move but it definitely does take away from some of the trunk space. These are our carpeted mats. You're going to put those in the car. This is our Bose audio acoustic sound woofer. So it has a high efficiency Bose audio system with seven speakers and you get the upgraded subwoofer but they got to put it somewhere so they put it back there. And then this I'm not going to open it all up but this is your holder for your charging cable to keep the charging cable off the ground if you so choose while you're charging overnight. So there you have it guys hopefully you're excited as I am about the 2020 Nissan LEAF. If you have any questions about this vehicle always guys comment ask me a question be more than happy to answer your questions. If you're new to my channel don't forget to subscribe and do that thumbs up thing greatly appreciated.