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

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).