Suspension lift for Leaf

[johnmath]

Wondering if anyone here has experience with raising the road clearance on a Leaf? We live off grid in the wilderness on an island at the end of a long dirt road, over a causeway and then along a track. We will be using the Leaf to drive to town for weekly shopping and business, but inevitably there will be the occasion when we encounter rough roads, potholes and rocky terrain or water over the road where higher clearance would be a distinct advantage.

When it comes time to change the tires I would consider replacing the 55 profile tires with 60 or 65 profile for an extra 1 or 2 cm respectively. The higher sidewalls may also offer a ride comfort benefit as well, though possibly at some loss of efficiency.

Another option is suspension spacers such as these: www.spaccer.com/en_AU/makes-and-models/nissan/leaf.html 

Most likely I would go up one tire size and add two spacers for a combined lift of ~35 mm clearance although the spacers are rather pricey for what they are at around US$800 + shipping for the number required.

Has anyone any thoughts to share?

[pharmadave]

Perhaps reach out to Chris from Plug In Adventures who completed the 8,000 Mile Mongol Rally in a lightly modified production 30kwh Leaf.
Here is his website:
pluginadventure.com/

For those who don't know, here is a pic of his rally car dubbed the Nissan ATV-EV hehe:

[brunohill]

I have been dreaming about lifting the leaf, but that is to enable a bigger battery to hang underneath it. (Guess what they did with the 2019 60kWh). I was thinking about a using spacer, but that is between the 2 halves of the battery enclosure.

[johnmath]

Jan 17, 2019 21:02:39 GMT 11 pharmadave said:

Perhaps reach out to Chris from Plug In Adventures...

Thanks for the tip Dave, I have sent and email to Chris and will report back with any information I glean.

[pharmadave]

No problems, it would be crazy if you ended up with an AT-EV replica!

[johnmath]

No reply from Chris, however I have found the company that prepared the Leaf for the Mongol Rally: rmlgroup.com/news/view/introducing-the-nissan-leaf-at-ev

[pharmadave]

Excellent! Probably better to reach out to the team that prepare the car.

[duncan]

I have the same issue re the local roads once we leave the tar. Our leaf is actually lowered a little as we have blitz coilovers which gave it only 100mm ground clearance on the stock tyres.

However, we run larger wheels and tyres 235/45R18 which have given us a fair bit of clearance back (I haven't measured it since), we don't bottom out anywhere on our reasonably rough property

If necessary, the Blitz coilovers can be run higher than standard too, so you could look into those if you can't get high enough using tyres alone. We bought ours through Just Jap, about $1,200 from memory