Will a Leaf work for me?

[WilliamJones]

I know this is like asking what is America's favorite sport outside the Super Bowl in the parking lot, but here goes. I am considering a 2022 Leaf, probably the S Plus. I live in central Florida where it gets quite hot in the summer. My concern is that the S Plus has air cooling for the battery and have read of a few cases in Arizona where the owners fried the battery because of the heat. My driving would be about 30 miles every other day, charging at home. Also, no long trips as we can use my wife's Rav4 for that. The Leaf might be used to go to the beach occasionally which is 60 miles away. That would be half freeway and half regular roads at 50 miles per hour. Of course that would be in the heat of summer, maybe 4 or 5 times per summer.
Question: Will the Leaf's battery be OK for me or should I look for an EV with a liquid cooled battery?

 

[Paul K]

From Southeast Ontario which gets jungle heat & humidity for 2 months in the summer. I have a 40kwh 2018 Leaf S and have had zero problems with battery overheating during the hot periods. Usage is mostly urban/suburban with some highway use. I will admit that I haven't tried a longer trip requiring DCFC during a heatwave to see what would happen. However, my experiences with hot weather usage indicate that with the kind of driving you are doing you will be fine.

 

[KarriO]

I'm going to echo Paul here. I live in Toronto which gets high humidity and high temps around 95 F for 2 months in the summer. I haven't been driving my LEAF for long, but haven't experienced any issues with the battery overheating. We've had to leave the car in the sun in a parking lot a number of times and when I've come back to the hot car after a few hours, the battery temp's been nothing but normal. Today we made a road trip and the did fast charging once. The high temp today was 93, and the 1x fast charging at a 100kw charger (which only gave 33 - 62 kw though) did not raise the battery temp to anything above normal.

I realize these temps are certainly not as hot as Arizona and that Ontario, Canada is much cooler than FL, but at least based on our summer and my limited experience here there have been 0 issues. I also understand that if I made a road trip with several quick charges in one day, which I didn't do today, I'd likely see some rapidgating but I don't plan on doing that and it doesn't sound like that's your use case either.