#Leaf

If you want to charge your Nissan Leaf in 30 minutes, Nissan will (at least in Japan) sell you (reluctantly) a pricy quickcharger. It costs about half of what a U.S. Leaf costs – before incentives and rebates: The current quickcharger sets you back 1.47 million yen, in today’s dollars, that’s about $19,000. Soon, this will get considerably, well, more reasonable. Nissan today announced a quickcharger with the same performance, but at half the size and half the price of the old one.

The first time Top Gear “tested” an electric car, it depicted Tesla’s Roadster running out of electricity and being pushed from the track. Tesla immediately pointed out that the batteries “never fell below 20%” during the test, a charge the British motoring show addressed by claiming that its review

offers a fair representation of the Tesla’s performance on the day it was tested.

Tesla responded again, and then three years later (as the Roadster was headed out of production) the EV maker sued the BBC and Top Gear producers. An online war of words erupted, with Tesla coming away looking rather foolish. And guess what? Now it’s all happening all over again… and this time, the most EV-committed global automaker, Nissan, has taken the Top Gear bait.

Last week, we brought you the news that the Nissan-Dongfeng joint venture will build an EV in China, that it will be ready by 2015, and that it will not be the Nissan Leaf. The Made-in-China plug-in will be offered by Nissan-Dongfeng’s “Chinese” brand, Venucia. This most likely in compliance with yet-to-be-released, but much-rumored regulations which will shower Chinese EV subsidies only on indigenous vehicles.

Barely a week after the news, there already are pictures of the future Chinese EV.

Ever since the power went out in large parts of Japan after a massive Tsunami slammed into the country on March 11, the big question no longer is “will I be able to charge my EV at home.” It is: “Will I be able to power my house with my car?” This may seem alien to you, but a Tsunami has certain effects, and this is one of them. At a press conference in Yokohama, reporters asked Nissan’s CEO Carlos Ghosn: “When will it discharge?” Meaning the Leaf into the house. A few days later, Toyota showed a house that can be powered by a plug-in Prius should the lights go out. Now Nissan finally shows its great chargeback solution.

My, what a busy morning it’s been for EV news! Now Nissan is jumping into the fray by bumping the price of its 2012 Leaf EV by $2,420, reports Automotive News [sub]. But don’t worry, you’re getting something for that extra money…

Compared to 2011 model year’s $33,630 base price, including delivery, the 2012 model will begin at $36,050. The car’s upper-grade SL model will sell for $38,100, an increase of $3,530 over 2011.

Brian Carolin, Nissan North America Inc. senior vice president of sales, was to tell an electric-vehicle industry audience in Raleigh N.C., this morning that the 2012 model will contain two new standard features, according to his prepared remarks.

One is a cold-weather package that includes heated seats and steering wheel and a battery warmer. The other, available on the car’s more expensive SL model, is a standard quick-charge port that allows the vehicle to be recharged up to 80 percent of capacity in under 30 minutes.

So, just as Toyota goes public with its fears about the ChaDeMo DC rapid charge protocol, Nissan doubles down on the standard by offering compatibility on the higher trim level (incidentally, Nissan says that 93% of sales are of the upmarket SL trim, and “most” customers opt for the optional ChaDeMo DC charging compatibility). As if raising prices by over two grand after less than a year of sales weren’t risky enough, Nissan is also gambling that ChaDeMo will win out when the SAE rules on a DC fast-charging protocol for the US market. At this point, it almost seems as if the charger compatibility issue might be more of a risk than tthe price…

The transition from exclusively gasoline-powered vehicles to the new panoply of permutations of gas and electric power has not been easy on the old emm-pee-gee. The imperfect-yet-universal (in the US market) measure of efficiency finds itself at a loss to compare an electric car’s efficiency with that of a gas-powered car, and completely falls apart as a relative measure of efficiency between plug-in-hybrids which use gas and electricity in different ways (see the ongoing battles over the Chevy Volt’s efficiency). Into the breach have stepped several challengers to the emm-pee-gee’s supremacy, including the weak MPGe (which was responsible for the Volt’s disastrous “230 MPG” introduction), and the “Kilowatt-hours per 100 miles” measure championed by Motor Trend in a rare display of admirable pointy-headedness. But the Gordian contradiction of efficiency measures is that they must be both accurate and easy-to-understand… and if the MPG’s history tells us anything, it should probably err on the side of the latter prerogative.

„When will it discharge?“ asked a reporter on Monday at Nissan. I ducked under my desk. “In one or two years,” answered Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn. I broke cover when I realized that they were talking about the Leaf powering the house.

Leaf or Volt? Ask the average person on the street that question, and you might get a response acknowledging that you’re talking about plug-in electric vehicles. Ask for more detail, and you may well be disappointed. Despite the many differences between the two vehicles, some simple and obvious, others subtle and complex, it’s unlikely that the average consumer is going to be able to tell you much about them. Why? Because chances are, your randomly-selected consumer doesn’t even know who makes which car. Automotive News [sub] reports that a Compete, Inc study shows

a little more than 17 percent of consumers polled knew that Nissan sells the Leaf. Another 13 percent incorrectly believed the car is offered by other brands, including Chevrolet and Toyota.

The Volt fared better. The study found that 45 percent of shoppers identified it as a Chevrolet.

Yowza. Considering that Nissan is betting bigger on EVs than any other manufacturer in the business, selling the only pure EV on the market and ramping up to 500k annual units of global battery production capacity, it needs to get on top of this branding awareness issue yesterday. Because as things stand, Nissan is making a gigantic global gamble only to find Chevrolet and Toyota stealing nearly as much credit for the Leaf as consumers give Nissan itself (13% versus 17%… what’s wrong with that picture?). Ads like this one are a good start, but Nissan needs to do more to ignore the Volt and make itself synonymous with pure-electric cars the way Toyota made itself synonymous with hybrids.

“And it goes like [human excrement],” said a freshly minted Nissan spokesperson who requested anonymity on account of him having been on the job for only two weeks. The “it” was Nissan’s latest racecar. It needed a special announcement, because it entered the hall with utmost stealth. None of the usual straight pipe roar. The Nissan Nismo racer is silent power.

China’s Gasgoo says that “Dongfeng Nissan has already begun preparations for domestic production of the Nissan Leaf pure electric hatchback.” Domestic as in Made-in-China. They quote Dongfeng Nissan CEO Fumiaki Matsumoto, who allegedly said: “We have already finished preparatory work for the Leaf. We hope that we can cooperate with the government and suppliers to bring over the Leaf as soon as possible.” That of course piqued our interest. After some calls, we can say with certainty: Instead of millions of Leafs roaming the streets of China tomorrow, we have a case of Lost In Translation with a French-Japanese-Chinese cast.

„When you run out of battery with your EV, no AAA will help you – except with a tow.”

This line is a favorite weapon in the low-level propaganda war between gas and electric. Now Nissan, purveyor of the Leaf, goes on the counter-attack. Nissan deployed its first roadside service vehicle equipped with a charger to assist EVs that ran out of juice.

After the zusammenhang of the bailout era, green car ads have juiced up the competitive battles in automotive marketing, with Chevy attacking “range anxiety,” Hyundai wrangling the asterisks and now, Nissan busting the Volt’s chops for enjoying the odd sip of gasoline. After leading off its Leaf marketing effort with a saccharine ad featuring a polar bear driven by global warming from his arctic home, Nissan is getting back on track by bashing its highest-profile competitor… and given that the EV market is still dependent on early-adopters in search of EV purity, the attack is a fairly shrewd one. Eventually the market will be less hung up on the novelty of pure-electric cars and will look at overall efficiency and capability. For the time being, however, Nissan’s got to make the most of its unmatched gamble on the pure electric car. Watch the ad after the jump

The previous day’s usage had left me in a pickle. With the 12 miles left and only nine-and-a-half hours charging time at 120V. Of course if I constantly had to remind myself, if I had a 240V charging station at home this would be a non-issue as the Leaf would have been completely full. However, my situation as it was, the Leaf was perhaps a hair over 40% charged when I left for work with the range indicator displaying 59 miles, hopefully enough for my 57 mile drive.

Since I needed all the juice I could get to make it to Burlingame I decided to forgo the pre-heating and let the Leaf charge to the very last second. Fortunately this morning was a hair warmer than the day previous being a brisk 40 degrees. Unfortunately the temperatures and humidity conspired to fog the windscreen. Without sufficient power to make it to work and use the defogger, I chose to defog the old-fashioned way: windows open.