None of those examples of significantly more than 50 mi range are real world conditions.
1. You can not expect the general public to hyper mile. As I stated earlier, you can hardly expect the general public to even drive the speed limit instead of 5+ mph over.
2. Driving a constant 35 mph does not represent real-world driving at all.
3. One wants to leave a reasonable buffer. The first low battery warning is a reasonable buffer for most, but many people would prefer even 20 miles buffer. Heck, if you look at when Tesla owners start getting range anxiety, it seems to happen when people get down to under 50 miles range. That's less range that what I start out with every day (80% charge)!
In my first year of LEAF ownership, I was able to drive 65-70 miles of mostly freeway at an indicated 65 mph with a small portion of city driving before LBW in near perfect weather (I live in San Diego!).
After 2 years, I have lost about 10-12 miles off that, which is expected given that I've lost the 12th capacity bar and thus about 15% capacity, which means about 55 miles before LBW. I did that both days this weekend.
If I drove "normally", IE an indicated 72 mph instead of 65 mph (note that the speedo on the LEAF reads ~3 mph high at freeway speeds), that would easily knock range down about 10% to 50 miles before LBW on a 100% charge in perfect weather.
Now throw in rain, cold and/or windy conditions and you can easily lose another 10% in range if not more - now you have a less than 3 year old car with less than 50 mile range despite Nissan's claim that it is a "100 mile" car. Perhaps you will feel differently near the end of your lease when you've lost a significant amount of capacity.
It's really too bad the battery loses capacity so quickly - it's my primary gripe with the vehicle. I really expected it to hold up as well as the Roadster batteries which appear to hold up much better than the LEAF batteries, despite being only "laptop grade" compared to Nissan's "automotive grade" batteries - especially considering that I live in an area with a relatively mild climate. It seems that I will easily exceed Nissan's suggested 20% capacity loss after 5 years - I'll probably get there after 3-4 years.
I really hope Nissan steps up and makes improvements to the batteries and makes them available at a very reasonable price to early adopters. Otherwise a lot of early adopters are really going to be left with a distaste towards EVs and Nissan especially. It will be very interesting to see how Model S batteries hold up after a year, since they say to expect similar amounts of capacity loss (20% after 5 years, 30% after 8 years) as Nissan.
