I have trouble thinking of a more wishy-washy eco-hippy sounding name than "Leaf". It's not even a good acronym; apparently LEAF stands for Leading Environmentally friendly Affordable Family car. Presumably the original plan was to call it the LEFAFC, and sell it in Poland.
I do not understand the point of this car, and I am speaking as a person who accepts the fact of man-made climate change.
The first thing is the range. I'm sure that, given it is electric, it will have good acceleration and regenerative braking, but the fact of the matter is that the quoted range provided by its lithium ion batteries is 160km - about 100 miles. This means that, if I wanted to get in one and drive to my parents house in Nottingham say I would not be able to make even that comparatively short trip of about 120 miles in one leg. I would have to find somewhere where I could plug in a cable to a 240-volt socket and wait 4 hours for the battery to charge, possibly a petrol station or convenience shop where the staff are either too bored or moronic to wonder why the lights in one of their display fridges have gone out.
I'm rather reminded of the rather optimistic claims that the manufacturers of my various mobile phones over the years have made regarding battery life. I have often wondered under what conditions they ever managed to get a phone to achieve those numbers, because I have never ever seen any phone match them, even when brand new. This is another concern; the batteries may achieve 100 miles when new, but what about after a couple of years?
I find myself thinking of the kind of back-up battery packs that one can buy for iPhones and wondering whether it'll be possible to buy a trailer with extra power packs. Perhaps you could get one with a diesel generator on it. Then you could boost your environmentally friendly car all the way to Scotland if you wanted!
This brings me to the whole "environmentally friendly" business. Let's be honest here, the best way to build an environmentally friendly car is not to get national grid electricity, in the UK over 60% of which is from burning fossil fuels, accept transmission losses between power station and the point of use, and then go through the terribly inefficient process of charging and then discharging the energy from a rechargeable battery. This is before considering all of the so-called "embedded carbon" in producing the batteries in the first place. You are not going to save the polar bears by buying a Leaf, far from it.
So what's this car for? Who is going to buy it? What are they going to use it for? The 100-mile range is suggested to be at city speeds, not motorway speeds, and so the implication is that this is supposed to be a "city car". So someone living in a city whose misguided sense of concern for the environment causes them to buy an "affordable" £20,000 electric city car is the prime candidate.
I have never understood the logic behind "city cars". Anyone who has heard me rant on the subject of cars might want to jump to the conclusion that I am one of those car-hating eco-mentalists. I do dislike cars to some extent, or rather what they do to the minds of the people behind the wheel, but my assertion has always been that cars have their place and that place is most definitely not the city. There is simply not the space to accommodate each individual person in their own car in cities, and when everybody tries to achieve this goal by driving into town en masse the roads get gridlocked, there's nowhere to park, pedestrians get knocked over, and the street environment is incredibly unpleasant.
This is the situation where it's best to just hop on public transport where there is no need for the stressful drive down congested roads nor the cost and inconvenience associated with finding and paying for a parking space. If you're the type of person who's set on going electric in the city in the name of the environment why not lobby for a metro, trams or trolley-buses where the power flows straight from the grid to the traction motors; it's much more efficient without this battery nonsense.
In any case, the fastest way to get around in cities is nearly always by bicycle. If you're going less than 5 miles there's no better way to beat the traffic and save the polar bears in the process if that's something you really care about. You can even smile and wave at all the motorists as they sit waiting in queues, steam coming out of their ears.
Both of these options are far more eco-friendly than a large battery-powered 5-door car weighing in at about 1.5 tonnes.
So it's not particularly good for the environment, it's not affordable (£20k?!), and it's no good for long journeys. What we have here is a car that is good for taking the whole family and sitting in urban traffic jams.
I rarely agree with Jeremy Clarkson on anything environmental but one thing he has said that I do agree with is this. If you want to cut your CO2 emissions, don't buy a new car, simply learn to drive the one you already have more efficiently. I would add my own comment that many journeys are actually much easier to make without using a car than the sort of person who drives everywhere by default would actually care to realise.
To be honest I think that this car fits into the same category as the Toyota Prius, which is that it's undoubtably excellent and cutting edge technology, but saying that it good for the environment is a bit of a gimmick to sell it to people who are far more environmentally conscientious than they are intelligent. Anyone who really wants to cut down their "carbon footprint" can make the biggest difference by living near where they work and dropping their mileage enormously in the process. This also has the effect over the course of a year of saving hundreds of hours of personal time and thousands of pounds, especially if one is within walking or cycling distance.
So here's to all you future leaf owners, what's important is that I know you mean well!
I'll start work on that battery-boost trailer, I'm sure there's a commercial opportunity there...
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