What Can You Fit In A Leaf

Published Saturday August 1, 2015: Updated September 7, 2015

What Can You Fit in an All-Electric Hatchback?

I love hatchbacks. They can haul almost anything.

Since electric hatch backs are not burdened with having to fit a large, volatile gas tank under the cargo area, they can hold even more stuff. The room inside is surprisingly ENORMOUS!

What can you fit? The question should be: What can’t you fit inside an EV hatchback?

Here are some examples of what Cheryl and I have loaded up in our Nissan Leafs.

Two Costco Carts worth of groceries.

That's more groceries than what could fit in the back of our old, gas, Chevy Venture minivan.

Another electric vehicle?

Hauling away the cut up chassis of a Geo metro EV to the scrap yard.

320 square feet, (almost 800 lbs) of flooring. By the way, B-mode regen works great with this much extra weight.

All the tools necessary to install solar panels on someone’s house, including a large 9’ A-frame ladder.

I spent several days putting up solar panels on a fellow Kaysville resident's house across town. The Leaf has plenty of room to carry everything I needed. And since it receives all its power from the sun already, this solar installation was solar powered as well.

We do a lot of home cooked meals at our house so we like to keep ample supplies of ingredients in the food storage so we aren't running to the store all the time. Two years worth ought to do it. I top the supplies off every 6 months or so.

50 lbs of Morning Moos milk (6-8 months worth), 100 lbs of bakers flour (4 months worth), 100 lbs red hard wheat (6 months worth), 50 lbs sugar (about 12 months worth). Next trip will be for oats, salt and beans.

Although much of our food we don't have to buy and transport from anywhere because we just grow it out back.

A tandem bicycle for our annual Midnight Ride by Moonlight around Antelope island.

All the camping gear necessary for a mother and her 4 kids to go on a 284 mile road-trip to grandma's house in Bancroft, Idaho.

Sorry I don't have a picture of this one, but there were 5 sleeping bags, a cooler, an enormous 10-person tent, blankets, pillows, backpacks, an extension cord and a portable L-2 Juicebox charger all stuffed in the back of Cheryl's Leaf).

That is by far the longest distance she has ever traveled away from home in an electric car.

There are not a lot of places to rapid charge here in the oil and gas obsessed lands of Utah and Idaho. But even in these desert, badlands, void of 21st century electric transportation thought or infrastructure, she managed to find an Inn (The Loft) in Logan, UT where she could plug in to a NEMA 14-50 outlet in the owner's garage for a couple hours while she and the kids stopped for lunch and visited the library.