or
a POS electric car for about $10k less
Posted on 02/14/2011 8:28:45 AM PST by Responsibility2nd
The all-electric Nissan Leaf is now officially on sale, advertised as the first mass-market battery-operated car on the market.
It uses no gasoline — and has no tailpipe emissions, because it has no tailpipe.
And even though it's battery powered, like a golf cart, it's a real car, fun to drive, with comfortable seating for up to five people and styling that's mainstream, not quirky like some of the hybrids and earlier electric cars.
For many, this even will be a practical car, one that can meet their everyday transportation needs — especially if they live, work and shop within a small area that doesn't require a lot of driving.
It's well-equipped, too, with standard features such as a navigation system, Bluetooth phone connection and automatic climate control — amenities once found only on luxury cars.
Some might argue, though, that its price qualifies it as a premium vehicle. It lists for $32,780 (plus $850 freight), before a $7,500 federal tax rebate and varying state tax incentives that can lower the price in some areas to the low $20,000s.
Nissan is making plans to build 150,000 of the Leaf annually at its assembly plant in Tennessee, beginning in late 2012, a number that certainly would qualify the car as a mass-market vehicle if all of those could be sold.
For now, the cars are built in Oppama, Japan, and the plant's capacity — 48,000 Leafs a year — is so limited that the cars so far are only trickling into the United States. Since it went on sale in December, only about 100 have been delivered to the more than 8,000 U.S. customers with firm orders.
But the key question remains: Will the Leaf ever be accepted by enough consumers to earn status as a mass-market vehicle?
Only time will tell, but after a week of attempting to use the Leaf as my daily driver, as a suburban commuter car, I have my doubts.
Range anxiety? It's no myth. This is the term used to describe the uneasy feeling one might get while driving a car that won't budge after its battery runs down, which in the case of the Leaf is supposed to be up to 100 miles after a full charge.
To help you gauge how much time you have left before the battery goes dead, there is a digital miles-to-empty readout on the Leaf's dashboard.
Only once during my test, though, did that meter ever read as much as “100 miles.” That was the morning after I received the vehicle from Nissan, and after I had kept it plugged in all night to a 110-volt power outlet in my garage. If you actually buy or lease a Leaf, you're expected to fork over about $2,000 for a 220-volt charger, which supposedly can recharge a completely depleted battery in about eight hours.
But in the absence of the higher-voltage charger, the Leaf's battery must be topped off using the 110-volt charger, with a cord about 18 feet long, which comes with every Leaf. There is also an indicator on the dash about how long it will take to recharge your Leaf at 110 or 220 volts, depending on the current state of the battery.
Also coming later on is a network of commercial 440-volt fast chargers, to be installed at places such as Cracker Barrel, Walmart, Costco and convenience stores, to top the battery off in about 30 minutes. None of those chargers are available yet, however.
When my tester was almost out of juice, the dash meter showed it would take 20 hours to reach full charge at 110 volts, or eight hours at 220 volts.
Leaving my driveway the first morning, with 100 miles until empty showing on the dash, I thought I was well prepared for my 26.4-mile commute to work and felt that I also would be able to get back home in the evening without having to do any charging while at work.
Wrong.
Here's the real scoop: By the time I got to the interstate highway that leads to my downtown office — the entrance ramp is about 2.5 miles from my house — the miles-to-empty readout had dropped from 100 to 81, indicating that I already had used 19 miles of the battery's power.
By the time I got to work, the meter read “51 miles” left, indicating I had used almost twice the actual miles I'd driven. Luckily, I'd had the foresight to bring the charging cord with me; I'd almost left it at home, believing at that time that I would have plenty of juice to get to work and back, and maybe even take the Leaf out somewhere nice for lunch.
At work, I found a 110-volt outlet attached to the building, in a company parking lot, and plugged in the Leaf. And when I came out nine hours later to drive home, the dash meter showed 77 miles left to go.
I went straight home, and when I got there, the meter was all the way down to 27 miles — 50 miles lopped off for the 26.4-mile commute.
OK, I thought the next morning, let's try this again. But wait — after charging all night in my garage, again at only 110 volts, the meter showed just 67 miles until empty. With more than a little trepidation, I set off for work again.
Surely, I reasoned, I'll have enough power to get home again if I keep the Leaf hooked up to power at work all day.
When I got to work, though, the meter had dipped all the way down to 16 miles, and bells, lights and a warning voice all told me I was low on battery power as I drove into the parking lot.
Like a dummy, though, I decided to take the car with me to lunch, driving it about 10 miles and interrupting the daylong charge.
So there I was, at 6 p.m., ready to drive home with an electric car that was showing 35 miles to empty, with a 26.4-mile trip ahead of me.
Add to that these conditions: It was dark; snow was falling; and the outside temperature was in the mid-20s.
When I turned on the Leaf's heater/defroster, just as I drove onto the interstate near work, the dash meter immediately dropped from 34 miles to just 29 — with 26 miles of driving ahead of me. Using electric heat, which is necessary because there is no gasoline engine in the Leaf to provide heat from the radiator, severely compromised the range of the car.
I turned the heater off. There was nothing I could do about the headlights or windshield wipers, but I figured I could live without heat for the next half-hour or so.
But with 20-plus miles still to go, the meter was already down to 26 miles to empty, and I began thinking about how to conserve energy so I could make it home. If I couldn't make it, the only alternative would have been a tow truck because AAA can't come out and recharge electric cars, at least for now.
Once the traffic cleared and the freeway began flowing freely, I moved to the far right lane and set the Leaf's cruise control on 55 mph instead of my usual 70.
With just two exits to go, about nine miles from home, the meter had dropped to 14 miles to empty, and the car once again was telling me that I needed to recharge. I dropped the speed to 50 and watched in the rearview mirror as more frustrated motorists came up close behind before pulling around.
With just six miles until home, the meter had dropped to eight miles to empty, and I began getting really nervous. Is this what they call “range anxiety”?
The car was getting even more worried about how much juice its battery had left.
Then, finally, I was coming off my exit, heading down the road toward my home, now just two miles away. The miles-to-empty display had flat lined by this time — no miles showing — and the navigation system asked me if I wanted to find “the nearest recharging station.”
I answered “yes” on the touch screen, and it showed me my own address as the closest charging point, “1.9 miles” away.
Now down to 30 mph, my feet, legs and hands starting to freeze. I began coaxing the Leaf along.
“Come on, you can do it, come on.”
I limped into the driveway, plugged the Leaf up in my garage and went into my house to warm up.
Conclusion: The Leaf isn't for everyone, as Nissan Chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn already had told me during an interview a few months earlier. And it's certainly not the car for me, with a 53-mile daily roundtrip commute and the need to drive sometimes during the day while at work.
Actually, the Lithium Ion batteries they are using now are not highly explosive.
or
a POS electric car for about $10k less
lol
Force AlGore to have this as his only automobile. Gore is so fat these days I wonder if he can fit into one
My first car was a 1968 Chevy Impala. I paid $500 for it in 1974. Drove it everywhere for four years and kept it in great shape. Then, I got an overseas assignment and sold it to my kid brother. It was ready for the junkyard six months later. You look at Impalas today and they almost fit under the hoods of the originals. I beleive tha Catalina was Pontiac's equivalent. Mine was just a slightly lighter shade of blue. I had a 327 engine in mine. What did you have in yours?
[Didn’t dig any further, as I thought it got the message across.]
You did and it was an excellent analogy, you don’t have to defend it to some nit picker.
+1
Depends. If the plant is nuclear (there's still 104 nuclear plants operating in the U.S.) or hydro, then there is no fossil fuel conversion.
And even if the plant is coal, then you are at least using our fossil fuels instead of imported fossil fuels.
Thanks for the link. And yeah, the parasitic losses thing has been on my radar since I was in high school (early 70’s). I remember getting an electric remote control car in the mid 70’s that did 30 mph. I was amazed at how reliable and trouble free it was compared to the fuel powered RC cars. And thee torque was impressinve.
I never thought about it before your post, but the engine is not the only thing that can be simplified by going electric. Maybe it will just be the last. Perhaps cars could someday be like diesel-electric trains. The IC engine only supplies power to everything else, including the motor that drives the wheels.
That's if you don't consider 14 mpg to be terrible gas mileage...
“If work is 30 minutes away or less - an electric car would make sense. Any longer than that, forget it.”
Your reasoning is flawed. First, traffic patterns may make your commute longer on days with bad weather and accidents. You may deplete the charge in these situations. Second and more important, people use cars for more than just work transportation. Children need transportation to activities such as sports. You may to take a vacation or travel to longer destinations for entertainment. Buying an EV sharply limits your transportation flexibility. If you do not have kids, vacation plans, a very stable work commute, and lots of flexibility to limit your EV usage to short commutes, it is an excellent vehicle if you do not mind paying a luxury car price. Do not forget about the battery replacement cost, reduced battery ability in cold weather, battery drain from non essential driving comfort (heat, AC, radio, ...), long charging times, and blackouts caused by high capacity EV battery charging.
That’s what frustrates me about these greenie weenies. You get ecomentalists like Ozero and his liberal ilk trying to drag people into useless electric cars, or wind-power for electricity (ask Texas how well that worked out recently), or banning incandescent lightbulbs. You don’t hear about them accepting that we WILL be dependent on fossil fuels for the near term and there’s no way around that!
We need to drill, drill, drill, dig, dig, dig. There’s nothing wrong with looking 20 or 30 or 40 years down the road at things like fuel cells or electric cars, but in the meantime, we need to look at what we can do NOW to make fossil fuel use more efficient, because they aren’t going anywhere in most of our lifetimes. For example, they have diesel cars in Europe that can get 60-70 mpg while still offering room for four or five and reasonable performance. Why don’t we get those here? A combination of ecoweenies going “DIESEL COOTIES! EEWWW!!” and the Big Three lobbying Congress to keep them out. Those obstacles need to be removed so we can get things like that over here. They may sell, they may not, but at least let them compete in the market.
Get the government out of the way and encourage free-market innovation, and watch what happens.
}:-)4
Nissan, make like a tree and Leaf.
What about the noise? Can Bambi hear you coming? Can Joe the Jogger hear you coming? Front end repairs are going to be expensive...
Maybe, if we’re good and buy these death traps in large enough quantities, Steven Greer will release the ‘free energy from zero point field’ technology running the UFOs he claims are just all over the place on Earth, just hiding in another dimension. Just never know if we’re being good enough don’tchaknow. But I’m sure Steve will tell us, when George instructs him to.
The leftists either want you to move near where you work, cost be damned, or else lose your job.
They would rather have the former because they want you tied to an urban setting so they can better control you and also if you still have a job they can tax you so they don't have to work.
Thanks for this eye opening article. We own a 2007 Nissan Versa which we like a lot, and I always wondered if their Leaf would be any good. Now I don’t have to wonder any more.
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