The first Nissan Leaf hits the road

I've been watching the development of the first mass-market all-electric vehicles with great interest. As urban runabouts, they appear to hold out the promise of greatly reduced pollution and (perhaps) greater fuel economy, although the generation of the electricity needed to recharge their batteries might offset those improvements, of course.

The Nissan Leaf, one of the first such vehicles to come to market, has just been released to customers.

Nissan Leaf (image courtesy of Wikipedia)

One of the first drivers to take delivery of his Nissan Leaf has written about his early experiences with it. Some points from his post:

• I made it home with 10 miles left as indicated by the car. I think that I drove about 85/90 miles that day, and recharged in SF for 5-10 miles. We did most of the Petaluma -> SF highway at 55, and I did SF->Redwood City at 65+
• Some people notice the car while driving on the freeway (I golf GTI slowed down as I was coming back from San Jose today), I had to accelerate to 80 from 65 and pass them again to kill the myth that electric cars are slow, but battery range was getting low, so I went back to 65 soon after.
• remote climate control seems to work the same way weither you are plugged in or not. I believe that I've read somewhere that if you're not plugged in, it shuts off automatically after a while.
• I got a manual, it felt big, it's made of recycled paper, and therefore is ugly. I haven't opened it yet.
• It's way more comfortable than my wife's fit, accelerates better, is much more silent, way better equipped. I like the fit though, so handling feels better with the LEAF (I wouldn't mind taking turns faster with it than with the fit). I also think that you have a lower perception of speed in the LEAF(ie, 40 mph feels slow in the LEAF given lack of noise, and it's a bigger car). After 70mph, I'd have to compare the 2 for real. Intuition tells me that the fit accelerates slower, but I could be wrong.
• I haven't noticed a big difference of performance based on the car occupancy so far, especially when comparing to an ICE car. Maybe that's because it's so heavy and that the passengers weigths make less of a difference? or maybe that's because I've only driven it for 1 day ;)
• 0-60, I'm not sure, but I think that the announced 10 secs is probably accurate. (I don't really have a street to test 0-60 on). 0-40 is clearly amazing for sure ... yesterday evening I left all the other cars way behind when accelerating after a light.
• I'm so glad I got this car ! I chose it because it's electric, but if it wasn't but still had the same characteristics (noise, acceleration, comfort, equipement, price), I would buy it (of course no gas engine can provide all of these ;p). Forget the environment, if you don't need to drive tons of miles a day, electric cars are by FAR superior. I should have known, people have said so ("Who killed the electric car?"). There's no coming back for my day to day car for me. EVER. Carlos Ghosn is right when he's saying that once you buy one EV, you won't go back to ICE.
  

There's more at the link.

That certainly sounds like a promising start - but the vehicle's still very high-priced for what it is. I'll be watching to see whether the price comes down with volume production. I think the electric urban runabout won't really take off unless and until it can be sold to consumers at less than $20,000, with a range of not less than 100 miles (preferably at least double that), and comparable room and comfort to a modern compact car.

Peter