Ten years ago, with then all-powerful Carlos Ghosn standing in the foreground to accept plaudits, Nissan revealed its revolutionary Nissan Leaf, a Ford Focus-sized hatchback and the world’s first modern mainstream EV.
Its design and development had cost about £4 billion, Nissan insiders boasted, which was around double what they would have had to spend on a similarly sized conventional car. But, they said, their view of the future made that outlay well and truly worthwhile – and so it has proved.
Reception of the Leaf was mixed. Futurists, early adopters and the eco-minded all admired the confidence of Ghosn and co in seeing where car engineering would need to go, but industry pragmatists were much less sure. Where were the customers for this car or the market forces that would make car buyers, always conservative, take it seriously? People rarely change their habits without powerful inducements, and there were none here.
It helped that the world’s motoring journalists were encouraging. Many hadn’t driven a decent electric car until their first go in a Leaf so had laboured under the delusion that an EV would be as sluggish and unresponsive as the proverbial milk float or golf buggy. (A delusion that took longer to shift among potential customers and still lingers today.)
They loved the Leaf’s simplicity, refinement and responsiveness, thus it was voted both Europe’s Car of the Year and World Car of the Year in 2011 – better recognition than even Ghosn and his most optimistic colleagues could have expected.
To underscore the Leaf’s decade of achievements, crowned by the fact that global sales of this UK-made car have now passed 500,000 in 59 countries (and a third of them in Europe), we decided to borrow both an original and a current model from Nissan to view and drive them – and, above all, to compare them for steadiness of concept. After all, many of Nissan’s decisions back in the 2000s, when it was deciding what EV owners would want, were essentially shots in the dark.
The early Leaf we found was a 30kWh ‘station car’ in near-perfect order because of a low mileage and a fastidious owner; the current car was an example of the recently launched Leaf e+, packing more than twice the power and range of that original, and with 0-62mph acceleration that shaved more than 3.0sec off the 2011 model’s perfectly respectable 9.9sec.
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Two things I'm surprised you didn't refer to: one is that the second generation car is really just a heavy facelift of the first. Essentially the same chasis and even some of the same panels if you look. I think that further illustrates what a good job they did of the first one with no previous points of reference. The second point is that for all the talk of EVs being stupid because you have to spend thousands replacing the battery, the majority of the early cars are still trundling about with between 70 and 80% of their original capacity.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Nissan's costs include setting up a cell manufacturing company (AESC), whereas other car brands buy cells from third parties (usually LG, Samsung or Panasonic). In theory this should have improved the Leaf's gross profit margins, but they made some bad decisions in setting up AESC and it turned into a bit of a financial debacle.
I *think* the 4bn sum also includes Renault's costs on the Zoe, but could be wrong on that one.