I've never even thought about doing a blog before, but I'm so impressed with my new Nissan LEAF that I want to share my enthusiasm with anyone who's interested.
In 1990 I bought the first Nissan 300ZX Turbo in Austin, and I was absolutely nuts about that car. Everything about it was exciting: the styling, the power, the handling, the karma. I never lost the excitement I felt for that Z after the very first drive.
I've had my Nissan LEAF for 10 days now; and although it's obviously not as fast or sexy as the Z, it's gotten under my skin just like that 300ZX Turbo did.
WHAT'S GOOD ABOUT THE LEAF:
The car is GREAT - solid-feeling, eerily quiet inside, with excellent handling and cornering - really fun to drive. It's remarkably peppy in stop-and-go traffic because the electric motor produces (silent) 100% torque right off the line. I'd guess zero to 60 is about 8-9 seconds, plenty fast for commuting.
The AC is excellent (very important in Texas) and can even be started remotely with an iPhone app; so that the car is already cool when you get in. All LEAFs ("Leaves"?) come fully tricked out with all the electronics boys love including great sound system, Bluetooth streaming audio, on-screen iPod controls, even a GPS navigation system that overlays a circle on the screen showing your driving range with your remaining battery charge. There's plenty of room and legroom inside for five 6-footers. The trunk is ample, and the rear seats fold down for hauling bulky items. In short, it's exactly what I expected.
WHAT'S DIFFERENT ABOUT DRIVING A LEAF:
The battery is good for 100 miles on a charge in normal start-stop city driving because that's when it's taking full advantage of regenerative braking.
However, once you get up to freeway speeds, a new reality starts to dawn on you: Wind resistance sucks energy out of the battery faster; so true battery life at that speed is probably only around 75 miles total (or only one hour of freeway driving!) until the battery is toast. At that point you'd better be back home in your garage.
At first realization, that's a little daunting because we're so accustomed to tooling all over the place at 70mph knowing there are gas stations everywhere. Assuming your gasoline car gets 20mpg around town, in the LEAF you're basically leaving your home every morning with the equivalent of only 5 gallons of gas and, for practical purposes, no place to fill up again until you're back home.
Recharging can take up to 7 hours with the special 220v. charger or 17 hours if you plug into a standard wall socket; so it's not something you can do while you eat a burger. There will soon be new public charging stations all around Austin, but it seems to me they have limited value unless you're prepared to leave the car plugged in for several hours at the mall, work, or airport. Basically you've got the 100 miles you left the house with in the morning.
The good news is that's going to be much more mileage than most people will need, even for a full weekend day of shopping and errands. Also, I'll wager that just about everyone who buys a LEAF has at least one more car in the family already for longer trips.
Fortunately there are all sorts of "can't-miss-em" displays on the dash and even audible reminders when you begin to get close to the end of your stored electrons; so you have ample opportunity to plan your trip to arrive home with plenty of reserve. Only an absolute boob would ignore the many warnings and run a LEAF battery all the way down to the point of immobility (in which case Nissan will send out a free flatbed truck to haul your LEAF home for you).
Last weekend I decided to do a "real world" test and drove round-trip from my home in Northwest Austin to the Airport and back (about 50 miles total) at a steady 70mph, a common trip for me. I left the house with a full charge and got back home with 25 miles remaining in the battery. Not bad, but you'd certainly want to have a gasoline-powered second car if you intended to do much more driving immediately upon arriving home.
In reality, that airport test trip was the only time I've ever been able to use up 75% of my LEAF's charge before topping off again at home. On a typical weekday I probably never drive more than 10-20 miles to work, an occasional errand, then home; and every night the car will get plugged in and topped off in a couple of hours (for $1-2). Even on weekends it's rare that I put more than 50-60 miles a day on my car unless I'm driving out of town. I automatically plug the LEAF in any time I pull into my garage; so the battery is constantly being boosted back up to near 100% between Saturday errands.
Of course eventually there'll be charging stations at the airport into which you can plug your car while you're gone. In my case I can already see that my beloved Lexus is going to end up being demoted to just my "airport car" once every few weeks so I can keep its battery charged. For everything else I'll be using my LEAF.
Filling up an empty LEAF battery with 100 miles worth of electricity costs around $3.00 at Austin's (astronomical) electric rates - compare that to $20 for 5 gallons of gasoline.
So the bottom line so far is that the LEAF does exactly what I bought it for: It will allow me to do 99% of my normal round-town driving using only cheap, non-polluting, non-OPEC electricity.
And it's REALLY FUN TO DRIVE!
I'll be adding more thoughts as time passes. Thanks for reading this.
Bill
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