The Nissan Leaf leaves, an AutoWeek Long-Term Car Review

the Nissan Leaf EV. MARK VAUGHN
In three months of living with the Nissan Leaf electric car, we averaged around 90 miles of range on a full charge.

By: on 6/21/2011

Three months and 1,673 miles in the Nissan Leaf electric car showed us, again, that EVs are ready for prime time.

Yes, as we learned earlier in the Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric car, you have to plan your routes ahead of time with an electric car. Limited range means limited range. You can't drive to Las Vegas for the weekend. You can't even drive to San Diego. But for daily commuting and semilocal errand running within a prescribed distance, the car worked perfectly, and recharging it costs less than a gasoline-fueled car.

Drawbacks? There is almost no real infrastructure out there, even in the sprawling confines of the greater Los Angeles area, which has been fully wired with electricity for more than 100 years. The problem is that the number of J1772 plugs available now is pathetic. There are three at the airport, two at the Convention Center and there's one at my house. More are arriving all the time and there are more than those we just listed, but precious few more. And when you do find a public charging place, it's not as if it's a CNG, gasoline or diesel fueling facility where you're in and out in a couple minutes. With electricity you have to stay there a while to get any useable juice.

The solution is to let the market take care of it. Independently owned and operated charging stations in parking lots and even in front of people's houses could work if it weren't for the expensive J1772 plugs. If everyone just plugged into 240-volt outlets, they'd be able to get juice. More on this later.

Range? That seems to be the only question people ask. Range per charge varied from the low 60 miles to the low 100s. Results depended on how you measured input, too.

Our average miles per kilowatt-hour was 3.9, according to the onboard computer. Multiply that by 24 kilowatt-hours, the capacity of the battery, and you get 93.6 miles average range per full charge, assuming you trust the on-board computer.

If you calculate range by taking miles traveled times 24 kilowatt-hours in the battery divided by the number of kilowatt-hours used to go that distance, you get 80.4 miles average range. Of course, that assumes the kilowatt-hour readout is accurate, which it isn't. We had to assume each bar on the 12-bar battery capacity gauge equaled two kilowatt-hours, but the readout either rounded up or down by as much as one kilowatt-hour. Of course, probability suggests it would round up as often as it rounded down.

If you simply take trip miles plus indicated range remaining, the average was 88.9 miles.

Any way you look at it, that's still pretty good.

Electricity costs 11 cents per kilowatt-hour at my house, where Southern California Edison supplies the juice. So a full charge from empty to 24 kilowatt-hours costs $2.64. That will take you as far as 90 miles. If gasoline is $4 a gallon and your car gets 20 mpg, it'll cost you $18 to go 90 miles. So an EV costs 1/7th as much as a gasoline car to keep fueled. Your numbers will vary.

Southern California Edison says it doesn't get any of its electricity from coal-burning powerplants, either. So in Southern California, EVs make even more sense.

During those three months the car didn't have any mechanical problems, either, not that you'd expect to have any in only 1,673 miles. But we should at least note that the quality was pretty good during our short tenure with the Leaf.

People can and should debate the viability of electric cars, but now that we have had two of them for three months each and come away happy, that should say something.

There should also be a healthy debate as to whether government subsidies are right for these (or for farmers, oil companies, students, etc.), but right now you can get up to $7,500 from the federal government and up to $5,000 from the state of California if you buy an EV. So the price of a Leaf drops to close to $20,000.

For many urban and suburban commuters in many regions of the country an electric car makes perfect sense. They're not right for everybody in every region of the world, but for many people they represent inexpensive and efficient transportation.
