Saturday, February 13, 2010

 

A practical electric car is (almost) here!


The Nissan Leaf is a 5-passenger fully electric car (called a BEC for Battery Electric Car) and it has been touring parts of the US over the last few months. It is to be built in a factory in Tennessee as will the lithium ion battery that will give it a range of about 100 miles and speeds up to 90mph. The cost has not yet yet been announced but Nissan says it will be in the same range as other regular sedans, suggesting it will be in the low $20,000 after a $7500 government rebate. That puts it in the ballpark with the Toyota Prius we recently bought.

I missed going to see it in Seattle when it was here in December but I've been looking over the Nissan web site here and there is a lot of information available. I have captured a few photos from the web that I'll try to upload here. I usually put my photos for the blog into my Flickr site but don't really want to upload these there as they are not my photos. I'll see if I can get them to go into the blog with what is provided by Blogger. The photos are from Nissan and some from Autoblog, a member of the Weblogs, Inc. Network where you can also see many more photos of the car.


This shows where the power connections are to recharge the battery system. There are two of them, one a high powered system that isn't something you will find all over but will find more of in the future and a second one (shown being hooked up here) that will plug into more standard outlets.


I see they come out backwards from the way I enter them. This is one of the two instrument clusters.


And this is the other instrument cluster, the one behind the steering wheel.



This is an interior view looking forward. As you can see, it is a right hand drive car but of course those built for use in the US will be left hand drive.

I see that I've got a bit to learn about using photos with Blogger's photo handling system. I think I like working from Flickr better, but this does work. Anyway, these will give you an idea of what this car is like. The Nissan site says the first of them should be available in Dec. of this year in limited numbers and locations and within a year or so, the plant in Tennessee should be up to full production and the cars available almost everywhere. It is looking good!

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