Nissan unveils the new LEAF with up to 378km / 235 mile range

[HEXUS]

The car also features Nissan's new e-Pedal technology, and ProPILOT assistance.

Read more.

[KrisWragg]

Loving the advances in EV's, had my Tesla Model S for just over a week and absolutely loving it! Off on a 2 week trip around Scotland end of next week so will get chance to see what they're like on a long road trip

[Wozza63]

Credit to Nissan, they seem to be the only traditional car manufacturer (so not including Tesla) that are making an effort with electric. This one actually looks alright as well, previous versions don't look great in my opinion. Range is also good enough for me. Shall have to wait and see but it is certainly tempting!

[philehidiot]

Whilst EVs are environmentally a disaster at the moment, they're probably where the future is (when generation of electicity catches up) and it's good to see genuine improvements in the technology. Even if we go down the hydrogen route, this technology will be useful. This will only cost Nissan money for now but it's forward looking and I expect that even with advanced in internal combusion engines, hybrid tech will become the norm in the near future.

The single pedal thing will probably die a death - I expect it would be more natural for advanced drivers wo are used to using engine braking rather than the brakes but for your average DSA trained driver it's adapting for the sake of the engineers trying to meet marketing targets rather than an improvement in control. The reason I say this is because if you tell the car what you want to do, then it can work out the most efficient way to acheive it, i.e. you say it should slow and the machine can choose to use inertia, friction or brakes or whatever to acheieve the desired amount of braking in the most efficient way. I suspect this will be brilliant in normal, long term use but will put off many at the test drive stage.

[Wozza63]

Whilst EVs are environmentally a disaster at the moment

In what way? The energy produced on the grid is more efficient and cleaner than produced by any combustion engine, even our coal production which now contributes less than 5% of the UKs overall usage. Even solar is now generating more.

Of course, go to India or China where energy is almost completely produced by coal and you aren't really helping, but the UK is middle of the road and it will be of benefit to the environment. Not to mention shifting the emissions away from where the people live means increased health.

[mtyson]

Here's Robert Llewelyn at the launch etc:

[peterb]

In what way? The energy produced on the grid is more efficient and cleaner than produced by any combustion engine, even our coal production which now contributes less than 5% of the UKs overall usage. Even solar is now generating more.

Hmm, depends how you define efficient. In terms of converting the energy at the vehicle, the electricity is more efficient, but then you have to consider ho that electricity is generated. The efficiency of aa thermal poer station is typicaly 33-48% - so have the energy available ends up as waste heat - some of which might be recoverable in combined heat and power schemes. But from an EV perspective, less than half the input energy is converted to electricity. There are then distribution losses and so on. However a thermal power station (especially a gas turbine one) is likely to be much cleaner than a car IC engine.

That said, an I C? car has hidden costs in the distribution of fuel, and the weight of the fuel it carries (but then an EV has the weight of the 'fuel tank' or battery.

However it becoes slightly more complicated f you consider so called renewable energy sources - solar, wind etc,which in terms of generation are much cleaner than burning fossil fuels - if you ignore the emissions created during manufacture!

So its not a clear cut A is more efficient than B. However it is clear that EVs are cleaner and less polluting at the point of use than IC engines, and if the majority of power in the future is generated by non-combustion methods, then EVs will probably be a less polluting mode of transport than IC powered vehicles.

[Gerrard]

Looks good, both the external and internals, and has a good range for £25k. Still too much of a premium for my use though. Interesting to hear in that video that the e-Pedal can be switched off as that is something I would find a little odd to start with. The fact that it also applies the normal brakes as well does make it sound like it has a brake-by-wire system which could be another complicated bit of kit to go wrong.

[keithwalton]

Whilst EVs are environmentally a disaster at the moment

In what way? The energy produced on the grid is more efficient and cleaner than produced by any combustion engine, even our coal production which now contributes less than 5% of the UKs overall usage. Even solar is now generating more.

Of course, go to India or China where energy is almost completely produced by coal and you aren't really helping, but the UK is middle of the road and it will be of benefit to the environment. Not to mention shifting the emissions away from where the people live means increased health.

Efficiency at the power plant is good but it soon goes down hill from there.

The grid is poor at storing excess energy efficiently so a lot of excess capacity is wasted.

Energy is lost in transmitting the power across the grid to the charging station.

Charging the batteries in the vehicle is inefficient and energy is wasted.

When it comes to discharging the battery yet more energy is lost.

Then the motors loose energy in creating motive power. Not to mention the vehicles require more motive power than a conventional car because they're so heavy from lugging around all those batteries.

When you track back motive power at the wheels to the power generated at the plant it's much higher than people expect.

Then there is the production of the vehicles themselves. Production of the batteries is not good for the environment and then like nuclear waste what are we going to do with all the spent batteries in 5 years time ?

Seems i took to long in writing the post and was beaten to the point so I shall add another :-)

However the future I believe is the following -
Using power generated from renewable energy sources to produce ultra clean synthetic fuels that can be run in existing vehicles on existing infrastructure.
It's possible the americans of all people are creating petrol from solar energy just not very much of it at present.
Also both petrol (gdci) and diesel engines can achieve over 40% chemical efficiency if you're willing to pay for the technology

[Luke7]

Whilst EVs are environmentally a disaster at the moment

In what way? The energy produced on the grid is more efficient and cleaner than produced by any combustion engine, even our coal production which now contributes less than 5% of the UKs overall usage. Even solar is now generating more.

Of course, go to India or China where energy is almost completely produced by coal and you aren't really helping, but the UK is middle of the road and it will be of benefit to the environment. Not to mention shifting the emissions away from where the people live means increased health.

Efficiency at the power plant is good but it soon goes down hill from there.

The grid is poor at storing excess energy efficiently so a lot of excess capacity is wasted.

Energy is lost in transmitting the power across the grid to the charging station.

Charging the batteries in the vehicle is inefficient and energy is wasted.

When it comes to discharging the battery yet more energy is lost.

Then the motors loose energy in creating motive power. Not to mention the vehicles require more motive power than a conventional car because they're so heavy from lugging around all those batteries.

When you track back motive power at the wheels to the power generated at the plant it's much higher than people expect.

Then there is the production of the vehicles themselves. Production of the batteries is not good for the environment and then like nuclear waste what are we going to do with all the spent batteries in 5 years time ?

Seems i took to long in writing the post and was beaten to the point so I shall add another :-)

However the future I believe is the following -
Using power generated from renewable energy sources to produce ultra clean synthetic fuels that can be run in existing vehicles on existing infrastructure.
It's possible the americans of all people are creating petrol from solar energy just not very much of it at present.
Also both petrol (gdci) and diesel engines can achieve over 40% chemical efficiency if you're willing to pay for the technology

Good points... it isn't a massively efficient process. However, finding, extracting, transporting, processing and purifying oil, is a lot less efficient than the grid (seeing as we're debating the efficiency of the entire process here). In fact, working out the inefficiencies of the oil industry becomes a staggeringly complicated task when you start factoring in the amount of oil used in transporting oil... I imagine it looks something like the Tsiolkovsky equation lol

[philehidiot]

In what way? The energy produced on the grid is more efficient and cleaner than produced by any combustion engine, even our coal production which now contributes less than 5% of the UKs overall usage. Even solar is now generating more.

Of course, go to India or China where energy is almost completely produced by coal and you aren't really helping, but the UK is middle of the road and it will be of benefit to the environment. Not to mention shifting the emissions away from where the people live means increased health.

If you do the calculations then even if you assume EV motors are 95% efficient (they're not most of the time, only when cruising) then the efficiency from the point of release of energy, grid losses and so on means that in terms of energy efficiency they're currently roughly (back of envelope) on a par with internal combustion. Probably, given the gernerous calculations a fair bit less. What you're achieving is moving the emissions away from populated centres to the power station which isn't a bad aim, but we must be honest that this is only helpful in terms of human helath and not for the enviroment. Once you add on the horrific lifecycle of lithium batteries then the net environmental impact is awful. Also when you appreciate the massive leap in efficiency coming with compression ignition engines, EVs are going to be left behind.

This being said, if you don't buy rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishty Chinese crap there are now solar panels (designed in Germany and made in Italy) which are 78% efficient and if you can use this with a battery system to charge your EV then we're on to a winner.

Just FYI in terms of efficiency calcs the assumptions are based on the following: you have a power station at ~30% efficiency burning hydrocarbons, ~30% of the energy from carbon neutral (wind, nuclear and probably generous if you examine our mix - could be a little more or less as we can't track the source of our electricity bought in from interconnects), ~15% grid losses, ~15% putting energy into and then ~15% extracting from the batter in the EV and then the efficiency of the motor being ~95%. This doesn't look at the variable efficiency of the motor which does drop well below 95% when setting off and so on, it doesn't look at transformation from grid to vehicle and it doesn't look at regenerative braking (which is currently limited to being crap due to the system needing to thermally throttle).

There is a lot of hope for EVs and the tech does need to be developed but there are massive issues regarding the way we create electicity for them and also running costs / servicing are huge limitations. The tech does need to be developed but if I were a punter looking to help the environment and save me money, I'd be waiting for compression ignition engines to come out in 2019, waiting another year for the bugs to be ironed out and buying one in 2020.

[keithwalton]

By compression ignition engines i'm assuming you mean mazda's HCCI engine which is a part time compression ignition engine that runs on petrol ... We should hear a lot more about it at IAA next week as they haven't officially announced it yet its all rumour to date!
As diesel engines are CI ...

One inefficiency i missed out before is the self discharge of batteries, most rechargeable batteries if left alone for a couple of months will go flat.

There was a car show a couple of weeks ago that had me in hysterics they were promoting all things green and had plenty of electric cars there plugged in being recharged by solar power ... except they weren't the panels could barely support one car the rest were being charged by a diesel gennie ... I kid you not!

[lumireleon]

Probably the best looking low cost hatchback to ever come from Nissan. Is the Leaf and Volt a threat to Tesla?

[spacein_vader]

Probably the best looking low cost hatchback to ever come from Nissan. Is the Leaf and Volt a threat to Tesla?

No. For the same reason the Megane (for example,) isn't a threat to BMW. Different market segments.

[Gerrard]

One inefficiency i missed out before is the self discharge of batteries, most rechargeable batteries if left alone for a couple of months will go flat.

Shouldn't be the case for an EV battery. Probably looking at a time frame of years rather than months, but depends on how it is designed and what parasitic drain is on it.

[peterb]

One inefficiency i missed out before is the self discharge of batteries, most rechargeable batteries if left alone for a couple of months will go flat.

Lithium Ion batteries tend to have a very low self discharge rate, much better than most other secondary cells. However, the traction battery does charge a convential Lead acid battery with powers the low voltage auxiliary items, but as the main battery will normally be recharged every two or three days, it isn't really a problem.

You can argue that the same 'inefficiency exists in an IC powered car, the battery and any losses are made up from the engine, using fuel to do so.