TAKE A LEAF FROM MY BOOK
Neil Lyndon on the pros and cons of Nissan’s electric car PROS: CONS:
Our year’s savings on petrol could pay for a holiday. On average, in the past, I have filled one tank a month. Since September, when I started using the Leaf full time, I have filled only one tank – for a long trip in the family bus Peugeot 5008. So the 2p per mile cost of running the Leaf (setting aside purchase cost) will have saved us at least £300. I have my own parking space in the heart of our town which is always empty. No matter if it’s Saturday morning or the middle of a busy working day, the two spaces for electric cars – with recharging points – which the council has provided at the municipal car park will always be vacant. It’s bliss. I don’t even have to buy a ticket to park (though you do have to pay for the electricity). The Leaf sets you apart (if you like that sort of thing). Never mind your Bentleys and your Ferraris: if you go out in a Leaf, you can bet you won’t see another. Ours seems to be the only one in daily use in Scotland, where I live. People stop and stare when it glides silently by. It’s one of the best-built cars I’ve driven. Nissan reckons the 24 kWh lithiumion battery will be good for 10 years. Nobody can be sure about that claim until 2023; but I’m confident the body and structure will last, in good order, at least a decade. No car that costs less than £100,000 feels more solid and resolutely built. With all the weight of that battery under the floor, its ride is as fluent and composed as a presidential limousine. It heats up instantaneously, even in the depths of winter. If you switch on the Leaf’s window heaters on a frosty morning, the ice on the glass dissolves in seconds. Internal combustion engines take an age to warm the air in a car (and, meanwhile, their tailpipes are putting out noxious gases and carbon matter); but the zero-emissions Leaf gets cosy inside in no time. It is changing my family’s way of life. Since the Leaf arrived, I have embarked on a full-scale programme of reform to cut our household energy consumption. By the end of this year, I should be charging the car for free during the day with electricity generated from our own solar panels and CHP boiler, pumped through our Pod Point charging unit. I’d certainly love ours less if I’d had to pay for it. The Leaf we’ve got at home would cost £30,000-plus (less the £5,000 bribe the Government gives to purchasers of every electric car). That’s double the cost of a similar-size Focus or Golf. You’d have to keep the Leaf for at least 10 years to save that much money on fuel. They talk about range anxiety. Heart-stopping terror is more like it. The Leaf’s nominal range of 80-plus miles on a fully charged battery is as fanciful as the mpg figures manufacturers