Sol, can you grace us with any updates on the Leaf now that it's been over a year?
Over the first year of ownership we drove the leaf for 57% of our car miles (8414 out of 14730 total), which is a lower utilization rate than I was expecting since we sometimes don't drive the SUV for weeks or months at a time. It's the long summer road trips that made up most of the other 43% in only a few days of driving.
At $2.50 per gallon and 17mpg, vs 7.41 cents per kWh and 3.8 miles/kWh (ignoring any free public charging and including 15% power overages in our lvl1 charger), displacing those miles from the SUV to the Leaf saved us $1,048 in total transportation costs (gas costs minus power costs).
The SUV gas costs 14.7 cents per mile, the Leaf electricity costs 2.2 cents per mile.
Basically, the leaf costs US about $25 to drive 700 miles, each month. It saves us about $100/mo in gas, for a net profit of about $75/mo. We have short commutes, though, and you "save" more if you have to drive more. We save less by becoming more efficient, because we already drive so little (except for summer vacations).
We had zero maintenance costs for the leaf in the first year. The SUV cost us about $300 in maintenance last year, to pass emissions and get oil changes. In previous years, the SUV had averaged closer to $800/yr in maintenance (tires, water pump, radiator, timing belt, batteries, new headlight, wiper blades, fluids...) It seems likely that our SUV maintenance costs we're lower primarily because we drove it less.
We paid an extra $150 to register the leaf this year, though, because my state has started imposing extra registration taxes on EVs that gasoline powered cars don't have to pay.