Nissan Leaf
Calculating the usable driving range
MILEAGE 3075
WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT
To see if Nissan has advanced the cause of EVS at the affordable end of the scale
The Leaf’s indicated range is proving to be a tad optimistic if much high-speed driving is involved. Although it changes a bit, depending on how the car has been driven previously, I’ve regularly been seeing between 160 and 170 miles on the display after each full battery recharge, but in a mixture of urban and open-road use the actual usable range is closer to 140 miles.
The discrepancy was first noticed one weekend as I was heading down to West Sussex for a party at a country pub – a round trip of about 120 miles from south-west London. With a range of just over 160 miles showing, I figured I’d have no trouble getting there and back without recharging. In the end I made it, but it was much tighter than expected, with less than 20 miles showing when I got home later that night. The shortfall has been similar every time I’ve done a longer trip that includes motorway or dual-carriageway sections. It isn’t a problem, but it does emphasise how much of a toll higher speeds take on the range.
Meanwhile, I’ve had a few goes at using the optional Propilot Park (£1090) driver aid that’s fitted to our Leaf. Now, I have to confess that I don’t really see the point of such aids unless you really can’t park a car to save your life, but Nissan’s system promises to be more advanced than many previous ones. It does almost everything itself and can safely insert you not just into a parallel space but also frontwards or backwards into an end-on bay.
I can report that it works – albeit slowly. Once you’ve confirmed the space you want and the direction in which you want to enter it on the infotainment screen, you simply hold your finger down on a button on the centre console and the car does the rest all by itself: accelerating, steering, braking, the lot.
The fact that the process takes about three times longer than if I’d done the job myself – a good 45 seconds in some cases – is enough to put me off using it, though. If you’re reversing into an end-on space, having started at right angles behind it, the car will often require at least two forward and backward manoeuvres before it’s done. It also has a disconcerting habit of speeding up once it’s heading almost straight in and then braking abruptly at the last second. The system sometimes struggles to identify the parking space unless it’s very clearly defined too.
I suspect that if you tried to use the parking aid in a busy car park, you’d have a queue of honking cars behind you long before you’d completed the manoeuvre. Frankly, I reckon it’s far quicker and easier to do it myself, especially as the Leaf allows you to go swiftly from drive to reverse and vice versa at low speeds without putting your foot on the brake pedal.
In most other respects, the Leaf is exceptionally well adapted for urban use. This fact was brought into sharp focus again recently after back-to-back drives in three new family SUVS with small petrol engines and manual gearboxes. They were all perfectly decent, except that I found them quite awkward to drive around town. And no, it wasn’t because I’d forgotten how to drive a manual. Then I jumped back into the Leaf, with its torque-laden electric motor and no gears whatsoever, and the contrast could hardly have been more extreme.
Unlike most conventionally powered cars, the Leaf never hesitates when pulling away from traffic lights or out of a side road into the flow of traffic. You never have to wait for the engine to restart or the gearbox to make up its mind which ratio is appropriate. With automatic hill hold provided by the electric motor, you’ll never find yourself accidentally rolling backwards on an incline, either. All told, the Leaf is pretty hard to beat when it comes to town driving.