No doubt you’ll be able to buy great $5k combustion cars in 2030, but ongoing fuel and maintenance means their true cost is a lot more than that! And in some parts of the world, increasingly stringent emissions controls mean that combustion cars become more expensive, or even illegal, to drive in cities.
You’re right about CHAdeMO, but anyone buying a 75 mile EV isn’t going to care too much about fast charging anyway. And by 2030, someone may have come up with a retrofit and/or adapter to make old LEAFs compatible with CCS?
I do all the maintenance on our cars (ex- tires, body, and warranty/recalls). The LEAF has already had one battery repair under warranty (at around 17K miles, out of service for several weeks and likely a $2K+ repair at future independent rates-was 2 techs for most of a day plus pages of special sealants and consumables)
Other than that it has needed wipers and windshield fluid and that’s it. If that pattern keeps up, they’re still headed to the scrapyard en masse, I think.
10 years of R&D on batteries by some of the biggest corporations in the world should provide some new innovations.
If you want to spend $5K on a car in 2030, you’ll have way better options than a 75 mile range, 6kW charging (20-24 miles per hour) 2015 LEAF (CHAdeMO will be fully dead by then and most 2015 LEAFs don't even have it.)