Nissan Leaf: Future or Failure?

[Lashout_UK]

Haha, I've seen a better version of that floating around (or the original non-abbreviated version):

How to pretend you have an electric car - switch off your engine, coast into a petrol station and wait there for 9 hours

 

[DiscoDave]

At the moment the Leaf doesn't interest me at all. Don't understand it considering what is required to generate electricity... and the effect that has on the environment.

More interested in Hydrogen fuel cells. But the process of producing pure hydrogen requires a lot of refinement.

 

[Jono8]

I can post more when im not mildly drunk but the Leaf is an interesting step, as is the volt. Nissan are claiming some pretty impressivly $/kWh on the leaf pack with the laminated sub pack providing good temperature control and servicability. Its pretty brisk at sub 8 sec 0-60 AFAIK and no rare earth materials used in the motor. CO2 is lower on your average Uk power blend and often before you do real well to tank on fuel comparisons where 20% of the energy you get is needed for the distilling and the petrol dollars spend on war theatres to secure supplies.

80% of the battery costs is still based on the materials so mass production will not gain much on the same chemistries.

Ive seen a few around MIRA on the A5 and im looking forward to getting a drive in one. FWIW The volt is a hybrid, mechanical drive is part of it now as pure series hybrid is inefficient compared to mech drive in charge sustain mode, here it works similar to Prius.

I think those were just rumours that said it would do 0-60 in 7 seconds ( based on a video showing a 0-47mph time of 7.2 seconds). I think its nearer 10-11 seconds.

Also, why do they have to make cars like this so hideously ugly!

 

[Matthew.M]

Best places would be in car parks - especially supermarkets and service stations - just plug in to top up when you do your shopping or getting something to eat - so you wouldn't be waiting for anything to top up, just going about your normal business.

Of course that would involve the infrastructure having to be put into place/maintained, which is unlikely to happen until EV's are popular - and they're not likely to become popular until there's an infrastructure in place to have them replace the conventional petrol/diesel car in anything other than city driving.

I've noticed the Highcross shopping centre in Leicester has free chargepoints in some of its parking spaces - quite a few of them too. Now that would be attractive, shop while essentially getting a "free tank" of electricity

 

[Jonnycoupe]

At the moment the Leaf doesn't interest me at all. Don't understand it considering what is required to generate electricity... and the effect that has on the environment.

More interested in Hydrogen fuel cells. But the process of producing pure hydrogen requires a lot of refinement.

At the moment you would be looking at 4 times the electricity of a pure battery electric car so that it would be worse in terms of emissions at power station than a typical fuel powered car.

The leaf is affordable, a fuel cell car is not yet and 1kg of hydrogen is around $5 and will do around 60miles....

I concur on the 0-60, seems conflicting things are appearing. 10 sec does sound more agreeable

 

[steviexx32]

Here is a company that has developed instant range extension for electric cars.
You can swap depleted batteries for fully a charged one in less than the time it takes to fill your tank. Its up and running in tokyo, and plan to have 51 swap stations in israel, plus roll outs in denmark, australia and the usa
They also plan to sell the cars for £5000 less then the equivalent petrol model, and have you buy miles for your car like you would buy minutes for your phone.

http://www.betterplace.com/

Looks very interesting, with some good videos of the system in operation.

 

[GingerNinja1989]

I've noticed the Highcross shopping centre in Leicester has free chargepoints in some of its parking spaces - quite a few of them too. Now that would be attractive, shop while essentially getting a "free tank" of electricity

How annoyed would you be if you drove your nice clean electric car to Highcross only to find some dirty petrol car driver has taken the last space with a chargepoint?

 

[DAnDan]

At the moment you would be looking at 4 times the electricity of a pure battery electric car so that it would be worse in terms of emissions at power station than a typical fuel powered car.

The leaf is affordable, a fuel cell car is not yet and 1kg of hydrogen is around $5 and will do around 60miles....

I concur on the 0-60, seems conflicting things are appearing. 10 sec does sound more agreeable

When companies start to actually produce any real volume of hydrogen fuel cell cars the cost will drop fairly rapidly. Production is a little more tricky though, there's high start-up costs on setting up the production facilities/delivery infrastructure but after that it can be done very cheaply.

 

[Jonnycoupe]

When companies start to actually produce any real volume of hydrogen fuel cell cars the cost will drop fairly rapidly. Production is a little more tricky though, there's high start-up costs on setting up the production facilities/delivery infrastructure but after that it can be done very cheaply.

Are you suggestion an increase in the demand for platinum will reduce its price? We still need alternativw stack chemistry to avoid that issue.

 

[DAnDan]

Are you suggestion an increase in the demand for platinum will reduce its price? We still need alternativw stack chemistry to avoid that issue.

I was more referring to the production costs and overall cost of the vehicle. Plus with more research into the fuel cells we can find cheaper materials where possible, further reducing costs.

 

[v0n]

The thing with auxillery power is that its power use it dictated by time not distance so you never can be sure. Headlights are minimal, not sure if HID but even halogen at 55w a light then 5W tail comes to 120W. Say 140W use after DcDc losses. Its rated at 280 ish KWh per mile. So 1 hr use of lights is half a mile range, thats not a lot change at 60mph. Heater, depends on air fliw through cabin, if preheated before and insulation etc. Not sure on the element power rating but even 2kW full chat will take 8 miles off, again not a lot at 60mph but at 8mph it essentially halfs the range...

I think 75 miles will be met on all but the most agressive or high speed (70mph+) driving cycles.

It's not just high speed driving cycle - Forbes claims traffic crawl test achieved range of 47 miles (UDDS test confirms, under 50 miles in heavy traffic). Considering neither tests took into account headlamps, mandatory from 2012 daylight running lights and/or wipers and after we account for very optimistic, projected loss of battery capacity of 3-5% a year, at the end of year three, while driving on winter morning and evening unlucky Nissan Leaf owner might find it difficult to get from Richmond to Canary Wharf and back, while his long distance commuter counterpart in theory might not be able to get his Nissan from a not-yet-implemented plug at South Mimms Services to not-yet-implemented plug in Thurrock Services across less than 1/4th of M25, even if we allow 8 hours between charges.

But that's just the beginning. Honest John test indicates Nissan Leaf can save savvy motorist approx £700 in fuel over 10,000 miles in comparison to similar sized diesel car. However. Considering comparable in terms of size Nissan Note diesel costs £12,000 and Nissan Leaf £23,000 after gov discount, average motorist would need to do 150,000 miles and keeping chucking extension cords out of his window for about 12 years before their green investment pays for itself.

In short, the target customer appears to be a well paid green environmentalist with deep pockets, travelling exclusively short distances (preferably during day, but not short enough to use bike) and with own driveway or garage to charge the car.

Best places would be in car parks - especially supermarkets and service stations - just plug in to top up when you do your shopping or getting something to eat

I think at this stage in EV tech it would be like expecting Starbucks to have universal charger for every phone from 1980ies brick all the way to newest iPhone?

And that's actually pretty good comparison. Most green environmentalists, when defending EV's use example of mobile phones. "Look" they say "many years ago people said mobile phones would never get popular, they were big, bulky, didn't last long etc and look at the market now". Well... yeah - let's look at it. The big, bulky brick of DynaTAC phones were available from early 80ies, but mobile phones didn't really become popular until mid to late nineties. It took 15-18 years to popularise, because your mum had no use for something that weighted 1 kilo, didn't fit in her hand bag and only provided 1 hour of talk time. And if mobile technology taught us something, it was that the appetite grows while you eat. 8 years ago Nokia business phone would last 14 days on a single charge, today you are lucky if it lasts two. With all the advances in battery technology and power saving tech in chips etc etc. We've taken entire advancement of storage technology and then demanded even more power from the same charge. We simply expect our phones to do much more today than few years ago.

69% of commuters in Britain drive to work. How many of us have a use for expensive car that needs to be plugged every 50-70 miles while we don't really have any input or control over time of the travel, road closures and traffic or weather or light conditions etc etc. A car that takes step backwards in "mod cons". There will be no heated seats, heated windscreens or chilled drink compartments in glove boxes. No puddle lights, DVDs for kids at the back or tilting sunroofs as options would make sense. You pay more, to drive less, get less and never get it back in fuel savings. This is the brick phone of the car world. It needs to do more. Drive further. Or cost less. Or it makes no sense.

 

[Angilion]

The people who buy into this great global warming crusade are free to buy them, good luck to them as well.

Petrol is not an infinite resource. We need something else fairly soon. Even if you're absolutely sure than humans can't have any effect on climate change, that's still true.

I'll stick with a proper engine thanks. And by proper engine, I mean something with a range or more than 70 miles, stations everywhere and that can be refueled in minutes rather than hours.

It has nothing to do with the engine - an electric motor should last longer than an ICE.

The problem is storing the electricity for the motor. What's needed is either a way to generate enough electricity in the car itself, massive improvements in batteries or some new way of getting electricity to the car, like electrified rails in the roads.

Batteries look the most promising at the moment. For example, the STAIR research project has working prototypes and is talking seriously about a tenfold increase in charge to weight ratio. That would reduce the weight of a battery with enough charge for a useful range down to about 50Kg, which would make it possible to swap batteries at a station. That would remove charging time as an issue for drivers - you'd just drive in, swap the battery and drive out. No need to care if it takes several hours to charge in the station - you're not waiting for it. So you've got your refueling in minutes.

Hybrid cars that generate the electricity in the car using a different engine could also work. It sounds strange, but it can work well because it makes it possible to run the engine generating electricity at a constant speed, which makes it much more efficient. Diesel-electric trains work that way. Jaguar's jet/electric hybrid concept car would work that way, although it doesn't work at all at the moment.

Of course, there's then the fact that there's no engine noise. Whatever happened to the idea of using hydrogen as a fuel for cars?

It takes more energy to get the hydrogen than you get back from using it to power a car - hydrogen is an extremely inefficient energy carrier, not an energy source. On top of that, you have the problems of transporting and storing the hydrogen, which are not trivial.

Unless someone discovers a vastly more efficient way to extract hydrogen from compounds containing hydrogen, it's completely impractical as a fuel for anything.

At the moment, electric cars are only going to work as urban runarounds for people who have garages they can get a high power line laid into.

 

[Angilion]

[..]
But that's just the beginning. Honest John test indicates Nissan Leaf can save savvy motorist approx £700 in fuel over 10,000 miles in comparison to similar sized diesel car. However. Considering comparable in terms of size Nissan Note diesel costs £12,000 and Nissan Leaf £23,000 after gov discount, average motorist would need to do 150,000 miles and keeping chucking extension cords out of his window for about 12 years before their green investment pays for itself.
[..]

It's even worse than that. You mention loss of maximum battery charge - the cost of the replacement batteries made necessary by that reduces the savings further. I think it more than outweighs the savings, actually.

 

[Angilion]

You can get grants for solar panels cant you ?

Wonder how bigger surface area you'd need to be able to charge your Nissan Leaf up every day given our climate.

Most Peoples commute to work and back is within the Nissan Leaf's Range. So you'd just need to store the energry through the day from the solar panels, then charge your car up when you got home and went to bed.

Rinse and repeat and you've got free commuting - apart from purchase cost and maintenance of course.

And tax.

The government wouldn't just wave goodbye to the income from tax on fuel, shrug and say they never used the money anyway. One way or another, they'll get the same tax from motoring. Given that ~75% of the cost of fuel is tax, the alleged cost savings of electric cars are massively over-stated for that reason.

The Leaf's batteries have a maximum charge of 24KWh.

So in order to charge them in 8 hours during the day, you'd need an average of 3KW (assuming 100% charging efficiency for the sake of simplicity).

A panel capable of generating 3KW peak costs about £17,500. That's noon on a blazing bright day in the middle of summer. You're not going to get peak very much in the the UK.

I think you might make it with £35,000 spent on panels covering about 3 square meters. Maybe. During summer.

EDIT: Looking at it a little more seems to indicate that I was being wildly optimistic regarding how much solar power we get in the UK. I'd now say you'd need about £120,000 of solar panels covering about 10 square meters and it still wouldn't be enough in winter.

 

[Fr0dders]

there goes that idea then

Wind turbine i think would progbably be closest.

But even that would be prolemtaic

"Hello Boss, I can't come to work today as the car won't start, there's been no wind overnight"

Sure that would go down well.

 

[godinman]

I'll buy an electric car when it is under 10k on the second hand market, has a 0-60 of 8 seconds or less, has a range of 300miles+ on a 1 hour charge and doesn't look like some sort of disabled mobility vehicle.

edit - saying that, I probably still wouldn't but one even then.

 

[Jonnycoupe]

Thing is your house would never be able to charge that.

So quick charging would be the only way and negates two of the advantages of an EV. No refilling at a service station and cheap electricity from your home supplier.

Mr LOL of course that wouldn't happen as you would just pull from the grid. Just possiblly with some free kWh as your wind turbine was very active over the weekend and did a good amount of feed in and energy account will be setup for this type of use.

I nearly went for the Smart car EVs on demo for a year but the lease was £250 a month and £750 for the first one. Screw that

 

[Aod]

everyone seems to be blithely ignorning the major issue with Electric cars - the DAMN BATTERIES

Li-Ion or Li-Poly batteries are the only ones with sufficient energy density to be practical in an EV, and they last about 3 years to 50% capacity, with current top of the line cells that are abused.

When discussing Lithium batteries, we must consider that discharging them and then recharging them frequently (say, twice a day, every day) constitutes as "abuse". Lithium batteries do not like to be used.

aside from that, consider that the major producers of Lithium are Chile, Australia, China and Argentina - countries that aren't exactly famed for their green credentials. i should point out that lithium mining is VERY environmentally damaging.

additionally, known reserves of lithium are thought to be less than just ten million tonnes, which doesn't exactly inspire me with confidence as to the sustainability of EVs

why people are so doggedly trying to ignore hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles even though they have efficiency ratings that match EVs, but also require almost no exotic metals, have ranges comparable to conventional vehicles and can also be refuelled almost as fast as a petrol vehicle. (assuming that the infrastructure is in place, but EVs need new infrastructure too)

people always claim that storing the (not especially large) amounts of hydrogen that HFCVs use is a massive explosion risk, but remember, the military have been building BULLETPROOF fuel containers for years, not to mention that lithium batteries produce hydrogen when abused really badly, punctured by a conductor, shorted, deformed, overheated etc...

battery-powered EVs are just mind bogglingly stupid in comparison to HFCVs

<edit>
Just spotted this little gem on the wikipedia article for Lithium:

There are widespread hopes of using lithium ion batteries in electric vehicles, but one study concluded that "realistically achievable lithium carbonate production will be sufficient for only a small fraction of future PHEV and EV global market requirements", that "demand from the portable electronics sector will absorb much of the planned production increases in the next decade", and that "mass production of lithium carbonate is not environmentally sound, it will cause irreparable ecological damage to ecosystems that should be protected and that LiIon propulsion is incompatible with the notion of the 'Green Car'".

i couldn't have put it better myself.

 

[steviexx32]

That would remove charging time as an issue for drivers - you'd just drive in, swap the battery and drive out. No need to care if it takes several hours to charge in the station - you're not waiting for it. So you've got your refueling in minutes.

I think this a great idea and is already in operation. Take a look at this website that I posted earlier.

www.betterplace.com

 

[Jonnycoupe]

everyone seems to be blithely ignorning the major issue with Electric cars - the DAMN BATTERIES

Li-Ion or Li-Poly batteries are the only ones with sufficient energy density to be practical in an EV, and they last about 3 years to 50% capacity, with current top of the line cells that are abused.

When discussing Lithium batteries, we must consider that discharging them and then recharging them frequently (say, twice a day, every day) constitutes as "abuse". Lithium batteries do not like to be used.

aside from that, consider that the major producers of Lithium are Chile, Australia, China and Argentina - countries that aren't exactly famed for their green credentials. i should point out that lithium mining is VERY environmentally damaging.

additionally, known reserves of lithium are thought to be less than just ten million tonnes, which doesn't exactly inspire me with confidence as to the sustainability of EVs

why people are so doggedly trying to ignore hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles even though they have efficiency ratings that match EVs, but also require almost no exotic metals, have ranges comparable to conventional vehicles and can also be refuelled almost as fast as a petrol vehicle. (assuming that the infrastructure is in place, but EVs need new infrastructure too)

people always claim that storing the (not especially large) amounts of hydrogen that HFCVs use is a massive explosion risk, but remember, the military have been building BULLETPROOF fuel containers for years, not to mention that lithium batteries produce hydrogen when abused really badly, punctured by a conductor, shorted, deformed, overheated etc...

battery-powered EVs are just mind bogglingly stupid in comparison to HFCVs

Im not sure where all the sources for that is but you seem to be ignoring the fact fuel cell vehicles also contain lithium batteries and are able to discount platinum as an exotic material? Platinum is present in all automotive FCV prototypes.

Lead acids produce hydrogen aswell, so what.

The main problem with hydrogen is that to get the density you need to store at high pressure as a liquid and to maintain the liquid state it has to be cryogenically cooled, its not like a soda stream! Also it leaches out of the storage vessel, what with Hydrogen being the lightest element known to man. Its stored explosion risk really is not the main issue with it.

They do NOT have the efficiencys of battery electric vehicles (BEVs)

The FCX Clarity does 55 miles on a Kg of hydrogen but you need 60kWh to electrolyse that much H2. That breaks 1kWh / mile. Pretty much 4 times the power. The same factor is present comparing to the Prius lithium equipped PHEV cars to the Ford Focus FCX.

Of course we could use EVs and have the power generated by a fuel cell that uses hydrocarbon based fuels anyway to improve efficiency over current engines. All those need decent EV drivetrains WITH gearbox to improve efficiency at a range of speeds.

We can not keep comparing laptops with crude battery chargers and abuse the manufacturers do not need to worry about (3years working when its got a 1 year warranty sounds a sensible way of making money to me) to an automotive active cooled pack with a advanced BMS. Xbox Play and charge kits are not representative of a Honda Insight battery pack even if both are NiMh. I know as I have used both
and only killed 2 of the Xbox packs after 2years....yet my Insight is nearly 10 years old.

As an alternative to the Lithium debate we either wait for large format NiMH to be allowed above 10Ah for automotive use, as used in the RAV4 or the Nickel Sodium ZEBRA batteries that can be thrown into a foundry at end of life to make stainless steel and road surfaces.... Its not just about lithium.

Transporting people around will never truely be green unless they are riding push bikes. EVs are just touted as greener due to local emission which can not be disputed, and the offseting of oil well drilling, retreiving, distilling and transporting is another factor rarely objectively measured, let alone the war costs to control the oil supplies.