The cabin was already looking and feeling a touch cheap for a car whose price tag, as a 40kWh model, starts at €29,890. The rest of the Leaf doesn’t make a terrific case for itself, either. I did, but possibly only because a knot of heavy traffic where the M1 meets the M50 reduced our speed, and therefore our power demands, just as the battery was running very low. A constant watch was needed on the range-to-recharge figure, and constant mental maths needed to calculate if I had enough in reserve to reach my destination. Is this a result of Nissan sticking with air-cooling for its battery, when Kia and Hyundai have moved to more sophisticated liquid-cooling? Quite possibly.įinally, then, on the return journey to Dublin, the Leaf did manage to do it in one hit, but without the comfort levels of the Koreans. Mental mathsīack home, I found that the Leaf needed topping up rather more than I was hoping (living in a terraced house means I have no home charger so must throw myself on the mercy of the public charging system when I need juice) as the battery seemed to be depleting quite quickly. That arguably leaves the Leaf out on a limb, as most manufacturers are now moving to the CCS-type fast charger, but for now at least it works okay, and the Leaf sucked down a roughly 50 per cent charge in about an hour while I sipped coffee and caught up with emails. The Leaf has two charging ports – a Type 2 plug for home charging or 22kW public chargers, and a CHADEMO port for 50kW fast chargers. A brief diversion on the way home to Maynooth meant that we were going to be on the losing side of range depletion, so early on I resigned myself to a lengthy stop near Dundalk to strap the Leaf on to a fast charger. In fact, for my first couple of days driving the e-Soul, I didn’t bother charging it up, so good was the battery at holding on to range. In the case of a recent test of the Kia e-Soul, the battery Korean crossover did that journey in one hop and I arrived back at my front door with just under a half-charged battery remaining. Motorway miles are the hardest yards for an electric car – lots of power being drained, limited opportunities to recoup power through regenerative braking – so whether I make it home without stopping to recharge, or how much range is left in the battery when I do get home, seems like a pretty good indicator of how an electric car will perform when presented with its toughest of tasks. That may not sound especially stringent but my home is in Belfast, and that means a lengthy motorway journey between one and the other. My usual test for any electric car is simply to drive it home from Dublin. The Koreans are better at holding on to that charge too. This SVE model we’re testing costs €40,500. The cheapest 62kWh version of the Leaf costs €37,840 after grants. With the extra battery capacity and range – now up to 385km on the official test – has come an increase in price. Now comes the 62kWh version, boasting longer range and flirting with the idea of being all the electric car one might ever need.
The initial 40kWh battery version has pretty decent one-charge range of 270km on the official test, and about 200km in real-world terms. This second-generation Leaf dialled back on the aquatic-creature styling (more’s the shame) and ramped up both the car’s air of conventionality and its battery performance. That first-generation model may not have had much range (just 160km, and that in ideal circumstances) but it got the ball rolling. Until Tesla burst, noisily and rambunctiously, on to the motoring scene, it could be said that the Leaf was more or less single-handedly going about the work of proselytising the word of the electric car to the people at large. It’s a little hard to overestimate the importance of the Leaf. However, as the new, big-battery, longer-range version of the Nissan Leaf proves, that's not quite the case. It was supposed, by the advent of big batteries in electric cars, to have been banished to the realm of forgotten reflexes and ignored instincts. It was supposed to be a thing of the past by now.
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