Globe Drive

I have almost driven the Leaf Electric vehicle, the one Nissan says gets 367 miles per gallon, or about 60 per cent better fuel economy than the Chevy Volt extended-range electric car.

I say almost because here in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium, home of the Major League Baseball team, Nissan let me take the wheel of an electric prototype that is very close to the production Leaf due to go on sale late next year.

What I actually drove was a stretched Nissan Versa with 300 kilograms of batteries tucked away in the trunk. And I drove it for all of four minutes, around cones. It was a demonstration, not a test.

Yes, the car was quiet, it was quick – Nissan says the real Leaf will go 0-100 km/h in less than 10 seconds – and it was certainly as comfortable as any so-called “real” car.

Nissan president and CEO Carlos Ghosn, the man who is betting that electric vehicles or EVs are the future, was here, too – selling not just the car but the entire EV concept.

“It (the Leaf) is a real car; it's not a golf cart. Zero emissions are simply a free premium,” he said in the November sunshine of Southern California.

Nissan and its alliance partner Renault are spending billions to develop at least eight different electric vehicles, some of which will go on sale late next year. The rest are expected to come to market before the middle of the decade. The short-term goal of the alliance is to sell 500,000 to one million EVs by 2015. Long term, Nissan projects that the EV market will comprise 10 per cent of global auto sales by 2020 – or something in the neighbourhood of six million EVs a year.

The Leaf and its lithium-ion battery pack will be built at Nissan's Smyrna, Tenn., plant. The first cars coming to Canada will be sold in British Columbia, where Nissan has already struck a support and infrastructure agreement with the City of Vancouver and BC Hydro, the province's giant public utility.

Nissan plans to roll out the first cars slowly, to fleet buyers such as BC Hydro. But Ghosn does not expect to have trouble selling his EV to retail customers as early as 2011.

“This car should sell without advertising,” he said, noting that Nissan plans to price the five-seat Leaf against other compact five-seaters with similar equipment – say in the $25,000-$30,000 range.

Nissan will keep the sticker price manageable by leasing the batteries separately. However, even with the lease payment factored into the equation, the overall ownership and operating costs of the Leaf EV, says Ghosn, will be completely competitive with similar gasoline and diesel cars.

“I want to tell you, we are not playing games with the price. You will have no surprises on this,” he said.

Of course, Ghosn is factoring in government subsidies as an important piece in jump-starting the move to EVs. The U.S. Government will offer a $7,500 (U.S.) subsidy for EV buyers next year, many European Union governments are putting €5,000 ($7,885 Canadian) on the table and in Ontario, starting next year, buyers of EVs will be eligible for a rebate of up to $10,000. The Government of Canada has no official energy policy, nor a policy to support EVs.

Yet Ghosn says government subsidies are needed in the early stages of what he says will be the steady and relentless move to EVs, away from traditional internal combustion (IC) engine vehicles. But once sales scale up to a million cars a year, subsidies will no longer be necessary. At most, subsidies will be needed for three years or so, he says.

Of course, real customers may be very interested in not only a zero emissions car, but also in one that boasts unheard-of fuel economy. That brings us to the posting Nissan wrote in its Nissan EVs Twitter page after General Motors Co. announced that the Volt would score 230 miles per gallon: “Nissan Leaf = 367 mpg, no tailpipe, and no gas required. Oh yeah, and it'll be affordable too,” noted Nissan, in a dig at the Volt's estimated $40,000 (U.S.) sticker price.

Of course, this begs the question: how are these auto makers calculating this fuel economy figure? Electric vehicle mileage is typically measured in kilowatt-hours per 100 miles. But that metric is unfamiliar to most drivers, so there are ways of deriving a miles per gallon equivalent.

Thus, it is useful to look at an article posted July 6 on the Society of Automotive Engineers' website. It tackled the problem of calculating fuel economy numbers for electric vehicles. Its author, Paul Weissler, estimated that the Leaf would get 367 mpg based on the Department of Energy's method of deriving petroleum-equivalent fuel economy for electric vehicles.

That astonishing number is just a small part of the EV story Ghosn was pushing here at the North American unveiling of the Leaf. Indeed, Ghosn has become the most passionate advocate for EVs in the entire auto industry.

He argues that cheap oil is an idea that developed societies have “collectively abandoned.” On top of that, he believes that concerns about global warming have burrowed deep into the collective consciousness of the plant. “Everybody says there is something wrong with the planet and they are asking government and industry to bring solutions.”

He sees the Leaf EV as one of the solutions. But being an engineer and CEO of two companies, Ghosn is also a businessman who rigorously studies the numbers, the economic case in favour of his car companies going electric.

Thus, the alliance's broad vision includes 33 separate agreements and relationships with governments and other companies around the world to provide the support and infrastructure needed for mass-marketed EVs. That includes creating a reliable, sensible re-charging infrastructure for EVs in all the markets where they are sold.

Oh, and yes, Nissan will profit from the Leaf EV.

“We will make money; we have to make money or the technology is condemned,” he said.

Of course, not everyone shares his sunny view of the future of electrics. Automotive forecaster CSM Worldwide thinks that by 2015, electric and hybrid sales will hit 2.9 million a year. But pure electric, or battery cars, and plug-in hybrids will total about 400,000 a year in 2015 for a global market share of 0.5 per cent. Forecaster J.D. Power agrees with that.

The truth is, no one really know how many real customers will go electric. But Ghosn and his alliance partners are betting that millions of EV customers will step forward.

“What we are launching is affordable electric cars. Zero emissions is a free premium” you will get when you buy a Nissan or Renault EV for “a price comparable to a traditional car,” he said.

Or for less. As EV technology develops – especially the battery technology – the price of a Leaf or some other EV should go down, not up.

“This is a nascent technology,” he said. “But this is a more sensible car than a (gasoline-electric) hybrid or an internal combustion engine car. The cost is going down.”