Hillhater said:
And I guess that was pretty much the thought train that Nissan went through when designing the Leaf,..concluding that it would mainly be a city commuter car and only needed a limited range capability.
They knew that it would not attract owners for long highway journeys , even with double the range or more, the lack of recharge stations and lengthy recharge times just make it impractical.
Hence my criticism of the Leaf. This car wasn't nearly as useful as it could have been. For a not insignificant number of potential buyers, having the capability of making a 50 mile trip each way for a total of 100 miles, at constant 70-80 mph highway speeds, WITHOUT needing a recharge in the middle of the trip, WITHOUT the driver having any reasonable worry about running the battery down too much, would have made the Leaf a much more usable and attractive car at the price it originally retailed for. The Leaf fails to do even that basic function. Depending on weather conditions and battery pack condition, 60-80 miles of that sort of driving described above is its upper limit; the driver has to slow down to 60 mph and render themselves a potential road hazard while draining the battery low enough for the turtles to appear on the screen, to get that 100 miles of range, assuming the now-abused pack is brand new and the weather isn't terrible. It is doubly frustrating considering that 20+ year old prototypes and even a small number of 15+ year-old DIY conversions COULD do the above quantity and manner of driving on Peukert's-effect-handicapped lead acid batteries one-fourth to one-fifth as dense as those found in the Nissan Leaf well more than a decade before the Leaf even existed on a drawing board. It doesn't strike me as an honest effort on Nissan's part, knowing this, and I can only look at the Leaf's sluggish sales and collapsing prices with yet more apathy. Nissan didn't need to do this to themselves.
I wouldn't even buy a good recent-model seldom-used one for very cheap(and they are all over the place for cheap), unless it were to gut for parts and place them into a front-wheel drive chassis more worthy of the components. It's not the 1990s anymore where heavy lead-acid batteries and worn-out forklift remains were the only affordable options to the average builder, and these new parts make extraordinary conversions possible. A 1st gen Honda Insight, early 1990s Honda CRX HF, 1st gen Mitsubishi Eclipse, or 1st gen Saab Sonnet all come to mind as vehicles that make close to ideal candidates for the Leaf's parts. This way, one could get acceleration performance to match or beat the average new car sold with what will become a 0-60 mph acceleration time significantly under 7 seconds, due to losing 1,000 lbs off of what the Leaf had, and an additional 30%+ more highway range compared to what the Leaf had to offer can be had thanks to a 20%+ drag area reduction in addition to the 1,000 lb weight loss, allowing the kind of usage described in the above paragraph. Care to take a guess what a successful transplant would do for battery life, per mile energy cost, and fun factor when compared to the stock Leaf?
If the rumor of the Model 3 having a sub 0.20 Cd is true, then I applaud Tesla's approach. Low drag is one of the ways to make full use of the limited amount of energy stored in a battery. A Model 3 with a modest 35 kWh pack could be made to get a reliable and repeatable 200+ mile range at 70 mph without drawing the pack down enough to harm it, if the drag coefficient is kept below 0.20 and assuming a frontal area of somewhere around 21-22 sq ft with a curb weight around 3,000 lbs. This is the equivalent of roughly 200 miles per gallon at the excessive speeds that lead-footed Yanks such as myself like to drive, in terms "fuel tank" to wheels efficiency. The Model 3 is claimed to be a sedan, and assuming such, much lower than a 0.20 Cd is possible if desired(GM Precept has a 0.16), but even a 0.20 Cd is leaps and bounds ahead of anything currently sold today in significant numbers(The 0.19 Cd VW XL1 currently sold today is too limited a production to be anything more than symbolic, but the idea has a lot of promise).
