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Max S. Dunn...when there is a will, there is a way |
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The Nissan Leaf electric car is making a 22 city tour and stopped at Stanford yesterday for a lecture and viewing of the car (although we didn't get to drive it). The car looked - well, like a car - and the most of the information was standard electric car stuff. For instance, a 24kWh Li-ion battery pack with a 80 kW (106 HP) motor will propel it up to 100 miles with a top speed of about 90 MPH. They covered the usual stuff about 95% of all trips in the US being less than 100 miles and 80% of the charging will be at work and home. The also estimated that it will save about $1,400 a year in gas costs, which just about covers the cost of the battery over the 10-year life.
They are working hard to be the first affordable EV. They expect to start taking orders in Spring of 2010 and start delivering cars later that year.
For me, the most valuable information from this lecture is that they are collecting zip codes of people interested in the Leaf on the web site and sharing these statistics with the electric utilities and some utilities are starting to upgrade the transformers in the areas that will likely have a lot of EVs. They also mentioned that some places can be very difficult to get permits to install the charging stations in personal garages. They said that the Mini-EV program gave up trying to setup the electric car program in New Jersey because of these problems. The reason this was interesting to me is that it points to a possible business opportunity!
Here are my notes:
Mark Perry, Director of Product Planning, Nissan
Site: www.nisanusa.com/leaf-electric-car