Nissan Unveils All-Electric LEAF

MojoRilla writes "In Japan, Nissan unveiled their all-electric LEAF (press release, and Flash site). Slated to launch in late 2010 in Japan, the US, and Europe, this car will have a 100-mile range, seats 5, has an advanced computer system with remote control by IPhone, and promises to be competitively priced. While this car's range won't work for everyone, it could be a game changer as a commuter car." Recharge time is 8 hours with a 200-volt power source, and "just under 30 minutes with a quick charger" (no further details given) to charge to 80% of capacity.

Comments

Re:Nothing to see here, move along...

[TinBromide]

Yeah, I was expecting the more recent pierce brosnan bond type cell phone remote, not this "Oh, my car has finished charging, I can leave this god-awful mall" type app. At least give me something that will use gps that I can log into and use as a lo-jack so my iphone can point me to my car in a big big parking lot.

Let's remember a few things for this discussion:

[copponex]

1) There is already enough juice in the grid at night to power 80% of the 220 million cars without any further need for more power plants. (According to the DoE).

2) The average commute for people is far less than 100 miles, which means the only thing you could be missing out on is a truck for hauling or a car for road trip vacations.

Now, the price hasn't been released. If it's under 30K, it's a winner. As the summary said, there's no details on the charge, but as long as I can plug it in at night and it's charged in the morning, it will not only save me gas, but I don't have to bother with filling up.

sign me up!

[SethJohnson]

If this car is less than $22k, I will buy one day-of-release. TFPR does not provide an MSRP, but it does say it will be low-priced. Four doors, and your gas bill gets moved over to your house electric bill. I never drive more than 100 miles in a day, so it would be perfect for getting me around town on all my stop-start errands.

Moving the cost of driving from a fuel purchase tracked with credit card might make it more difficult for people to get reimbursed by their company for business driving. I wonder how that's going to get sorted. Also, in a roommate situation, it becomes a little unfair to evenly split the electric bill if only one tennant is charging a car.

Looks cool.

Seth

on the road charging?

[Dare nMc]

I was wondering if I could do the same thing I have for camping trips. I have a front and rear receiver hitch, and a 220V generator on a mount that slides into the receiver hitch. It's 5 hp, and runs a RV air conditioner for 5 hours on under 5 gallons, I am sure you could do a better generator mount than this guy if we get a hitch mount, and just plug the car charger into it for road trips, ditch the weight for in town. Hopefully the chargers aren't locked out while moving. Not only does the GEN not have to meet as many emissions standards ( = cheaper) but has other uses also.

Got one

[protonbishop]

not a Leaf, but Toyota's Rav4EV. BEV, 100miles/charge, been driving it since 2002. Seats 4, not 5 & we have a Palm app, not iPhone app. I don't have a fast charge option, so that's cool. One hopes "state of the art" exceeds what Toyota did nearly ten years ago:

• Air Conditioning "costs" 5 miles per hour of use. Heat costs only a little less than that (No internal combustion engine generating heat, ya know).
• Bumper-to-bumper traffic isn't a problem: Car uses nearly zero at 'idle'. The worry I have is an unexpected detour which adds 20 miles.
• Heated windshield costs a few miles per hour of use. Lights, radio, heated seats are nearly free.
• The "100 miles on a charge claim" corresponds in the real world to driving consistently at about 65 mph, or mixed city/highway driving. Driving at 75 mph decreases distance by ~10%. Driving at 55mph would yield > 100 miles. Driving at 35 mph (constant) would probably yield a +30% distance gain. City driving results in lots of braking & though regenerative, there is loss, so consider 90 miles in the city.
• On low battery, the car goes into a special "turtle" mode whereby one cannot drive quickly. I've driven an extra 20 miles at about 15 mph in this mode after the gauges registered zero. Was unable to drain the batteries because I got bored trying.

Sure, I use another car for driving vacations, but these battery electric cars are perfect for some of us.

Re:Before anyone panics

[Rei]

I'm starting a company to do just that -- Celadon Applications, LLC. We already have a fully functional prototype and are in the middle of raising money to add some more features and polish to make it into a commercial product (the prototype is a bit cluttered and could use to be more user-friendly). The prototype makes use of weather forecasts, 10-meter altitude data with a vertical resolution of 4 inches, and so forth, along with driver behavior modeling and physics calculations every several meters to determine how much charge you'll have at each point along the trip. The final version will have a very powerful crowd-sourced, trust network-validated charger database overlay on the map as well (it's coded, but is currently being debugged). So you find your route won't make it to your destination, no problem -- you drag it over to a charging station. And you can click on the station, get pictures, reviews, find what there is to do in the area, etc. It'll initially be populated with not just "known" recharging stations, but also "likely" recharging places, such as RV parks and so forth -- as well as phone numbers and email addresses to contact their owners. And you can add your own charging stations, even just a high-power outlet in your garage -- and list a fee for it if you want.

We've done some accuracy validation on the simulator part with a Tesla Roadster. Of 7-ish legs that we tested, all but one of them were in the 2-4% error range. The last one was on surface streets and was about 12% error because Google was way off on how much traffic there was going to be (they said 40 minutes, it actually took closer to 25); when we hard-coded it to get the amount of traffic right, it fell back into the normal error range. To counter that issue, we're going to add real-time traffic forecasts in wherever available. Oh, and this is so far without any of Tesla's help. If we can get more detailed hardware specs, we can do even better.

The market forecasts range wildly, but they range from a million or two EVs up to 32.7 million shipped by 2015 (Wintergreen Research). Either way, it's a massive market, and even with just a couple percent penetration, there's huge profit potential and the potential to create a lot of jobs. And it should help open up the EV market to a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise consider them. And most of our competition is way behind -- the standard approach, you'll find, is just to draw a circle around the car and say this is how far you can drive (as though you can go just as far over the top of Mount Whitney as you can over flat land on good roads).

Re:100 miles with or without A/C?

[Martin Blank]

Been there, done that. Mid-summer Los Angeles traffic near the 405/101 interchange with two nearby accidents a few years ago (one of the events that scarred me enough to stay out of LA whenever possible). Temps were right around the 100-degree mark, and all of those exhaust vapors made breathing even more difficult. The engine was overheating, so I had to kill the A/C to reduce the load, and rolled down all of the windows. It wasn't a pleasant scenario, but even though there was little wind, it was not the deadly oven that you're describing.

Re:100 miles with or without A/C?

[iamacat]

And just where do you think the power comes from when you plug into the wall?

Well, I am pretty sure it at least comes from United States.