Nissan Leaf Coming to Australia 2012

By Alborz Fallah | February 24th, 2010

Ahead of an official preview of a prototype Nissan LEAF in Sydney in the next few weeks, Nissan Australia Managing Director & CEO Dan Thompson said the all-electric LEAF will be on sale in Australia by 2012.

Speaking to Journalists at the launch of the company’s premium 370Z Roadster, Mr Thompson said the Nissan LEAF is the company’s solution to zero emission vehicles and is the first one of a series of zero emission cars expected from the Japanese giant.

The all-electric LEAF, which can go for 160km on one single charge, will go on sale in the United States and Japan this year before a global roll out takes place in 2011-2012.

The environmentally friendly vehicle makes use of lithium ion battery packs to achieve its results and there is already talk of Nissan working on lighter batteries that can deliver almost 650km on one single charge.

Nissan is hoping that support from the Australian government will help spread the message that zero emission all-electric cars are here and able to meet the daily driving needs of most Australians.

Shak

This is good news. If more EV’s sign up for Australian residency, the government will have no choice but to partly fund the EV network being proposed by Israeli Better Place. The shift to electricity continues!
lazybones

This is good news, the leaf looks like a very good package. Admittedly a butt ugly one. The more of this technology that comes to Australia the better for all of us. No point in being left behind with future technologies.
Tom22

Now if only we could move to nuclear generators.

Im still more compelled by the Volt at this time, but if they could give you 650kms of cruising range on a single overnight charge, it would be game over petrol.
Brett

Will Nissan actually be selling these cars in Australia or leasing them? From what I’ve read, they’ll be leasing them in the US. Why not just sell them outright?

lazybones

I heard they were planning on selling the cars and leasing the batteries. With the idea being the running costs would be on par with a petrol car.

Huh?

Zero emissions is great for the environment however the daily running costs may even be more than petrol. With electricity prices constantly on the rise. Who knows how much it would cost to fill up this thing. And you only get 160kms out of it. It could be Nissan’s version of the petrol Mazda RX8. Face value RX8 is only a 1.3 litre engine but it drinks more than our local V8′s. Plus the RX8 has next to no torque.

lazybones

yeah right, this car has a 16Kwh pack, at 17c per Kwh thats $2.72 to fill up from completely dead. Thats 1.7c per Km compared to about 9-12c per Km for a similar sized petrol car. Then consider fuel rises in cost quicker than electricity.
Lazybones

**Correction** The leaf has a 24Kwh battery pack so about $4 to fillup and 2.5c per km

What

What fuel is required to make electricity? Coal. Environmental concerns with coal would be far greater than your average Joe moving from a 4 cylinder petrol to all electric.

MK

France gets most of their electricity from Nuclear, Iceland gets most of theirs from Geothermal…

California will stop buying electricity from coal power stations soon…
Jordan

@What: Actually we would still be better off with EV’s even if the power does come from Coal. The reason is a few massive coal power stations are much more efficient (i.e. pollution created per unit of usefull energy), than running many thousands of tiny (by comparison) ICE vehicles. As ‘dirty’ as coal is, small pertol ICE’s can’t compare due to the massive economies of scale involved.

Ofcourse the greener the electricity source the better the situation gets. Perhaps in the future we might see workplaces offering solar charging for their staff’s vehicles, while they’re parked at work.

vid_ghost

your petrol engine is very inefficient at generating energy! maybe 20% to what it pumps out as smoke
A Coal burning powerplant would be about 70% to the same amount of smoke.

So at the end of the day your better off using the powerstation to move your car.

Hung Low

Did you factor in the energy consumed for mining and transporting the coal to the power station? What about the impact on the environment that mining leaves behind?
I am still skeptical that electric cars are the total solution, their use of rare earth metals in the motors and battery disposal etc might leave behind a total lifespan footprint not much smaller than a current small econobox. It is a good start by Nissan as the technology could only evolve to something better.
What I do not get is that CNG which has nothing to do with petroleum or coal is adaptable to current engines, cheap, clean and in abundance so why have manufacturers steered away?

Shak

First of all if MrBenz took into account the thermal efficiency of combustion engines and the cost of transoprting fuel, the car would never have been made. And CNG has quiet a bit to do with coal and Petroleum as it is a fossil fuel. EV’s are much more efficient, and even if we use coal we are using a fossil fuel with at least 100 years of supply left, and as the above comment states it is much more efficient.

Hung Low

When the car was first made, they were still using whale blubber for lamp oil! I am sure efficiency meant squat back then! The problem with the combustion gasoline engine is thermal loss (heat) which makes it inefficient. While electric motors are better, they require plenty of energy to draw large amperage as in automotive requirements.
Yes CNG is a fossil fuel, mainly methane so I do not see its relevance to other sources such a coal & petroleum, are you thinking LPG? CNG’s biggest drawback is storage and consumption! If you advocate burning more coal to keep EV’s running perhaps we should revert back to the steam engine instead ? I do not see the purpose! The only saviour to the EV will be more efficient battery technology, that stores more energy and requires less charging. The basic laws of physics (you cannot get out more than you put in) will always be a big problem though!
Lazybones

“While electric motors are better, they require plenty of energy to draw large amperage as in automotive requirements.”

Despite that they are the most efficient way to propel a car. Not to mention a typical electric motor can run an average car for over 1.5Million Km’s. They are capable of 100,000kms without maintenance alone.

One problem with NG is supply and demand. There have already been plans to make NG electricity plants in WA. But these plans have been scrapped in favour of coal! The main reason is there is more money exporting NG as LNG so the local market gets squeezed out.

Jordan

@Lazybones: We now have NG power stations in WA (a 330MW station opened in Neerabup just last year), however these are what’s called ‘peaking’ power stations, and they are typically only used to generate during peak load periods – when the value of the electricity is greatest.

For running a power station, gas is still a lot more expensive than coal, and will remain so until the government puts a price on carbon pollution. That is why you don’t see many ‘base-load’ (i.e. always generating) gas-fired power stations. This may change in the future if we get an ETS or some other carbon tax.

Jordan

… And did you forget to factor in the energy cost it takes to drill for oil, transport it to a refinery, distill that into petrol, distribute it to the petrol stations, etc?

I agree with you on the CNG though… I can’t think why our government isn’t actively encouraging CNG, as we have it in such abundance (other than they are too busy flogging it off to China for a song).
CNG would also be much greener (and still cheaper I think, with todays prices) than petrol.
They should be offering rebates on CNG conversions & home-fuelling stations connected to your domestic gas supply.

Heavy metals in batteries are certainly a big issue, but hopefully we can implement a 100% recycling system in the future, so these toxic metals don’t end up in land-fill. I guess that could (or should) be one of the reason why the batteries are being ‘leased’ in some places, instead of sold-outright with the vehicle. It would be easier to ensure the batteries are recycled properly if the manufacturer retains ownership/responsibility for them.

Tony

makes a lot of sense is places like France where 70% of electric is from nuclear…

and where does Renault come from? there ya go…
nj

What many readers dont seem to get is the efficientcy of electric motor compared to petrol motors. electric motors are around 90% efficient, petrol motors are around 15% efficient, which means even if the electricity comes from coal as in Australia, the overall emissions are still just 30% of a fossil fuel burning car. so it still helps a lot to have electric cars in Australia. Dont be fooled by oil company black PR.