How the batteries are cooled
How the batteries are cooled or heated is important to know, especially if you live in warmer climates. It definitely is not a point that Nissan mentioned in advertising, but most anyone who knows a Leaf owner has heard stories of the loss of range over time because the batteries are air cooled. Also range can be shortened by overcharging the batteries as well. I have two friends who owned Leafs, and the range was supposed to be 90-100 miles when new, but it was realistically around 72 miles. The difficulty for one of the friends was that his daily commute to work was 50 miles round trip, and depending on temp, speed, and load he was having a harder and harder time of making the 50 mi. round trip with any miles left over. Over 3 years of driving his real battery range went from 70 miles to 52 miles, and I believe that was because the batteries were air cooled.
I've had 3 Volts and so far none of them lost range over time. The Volt's batteries are similarly affected by temperature, speed, and load, but I averaged between 35 and 46 miles per charge (it was rated at 38 miles), and with all 3 Volts the maximum range remained the same as long as I had the cars, and I attribute the fact that there was no range degradation to the active cooling and heating of the batteries.
The Tesla, Volt, and Bolt all use liquid glycol for cooling, but the designs are different. The Tesla has a single cooling tube that snakes coolant through each battery. The Volt has coolant channels that run in plates that separate each battery, and the Bolt (like BMW's EV cooling design) uses bottom cooling plates beneath the batteries to manage the temperatures.
My friend whose Leaf could no longer make it to work and back has since bought a 2017 Volt, and interestingly the new Volt gets 58 miles of range, so he makes it to work and back without using gas. He has had the new Volt for a year now and he said that the range is unchanged.