cts | Volt a Day | Not Blown Away by the Leaf October 03, 2010

I really wanted to love this car. I mean, if I were Lance Armstrong and Nissan had already delivered my Leaf (pictured above), maybe I would be writing about how much I loved this car. Instead, I made an appointment to test drive the Leaf at the AltCar Expo here in Santa Monica.

I arrived at 8:30am for the 9am ride. Nissan had four huge tents set up in the parking lot. Every one of them had glass stretched floor to eaves, and a floor with wall-to-wall blue astroturf. There were slick videos rolling on projectors and flat screens, computer monitors listing the drivers next up, and a lot of people in very snappy looking Nissan Leaf outfits. Any moment I looked even slightly lost someone came over to talk to me.

They had a full-scale cutaway of the chassis with the battery pack installed, to show the scale and how it was put together. They had consulted with queue experts like those that streamlined DisneyLand and once you were in a group of drivers headed to the car you moved from tent to tent learning about the car, the technology, the charging, and looking at a huge touchscreen map to see what the range would me to you in your daily life (here is my home, here is work, here is the kids’ school...). There were two Leafs out on static display with all the doors open for you to hop in and play with the knobs.

Then we waited alongside the Recharge Lounge, watching the Leaf cars roll in from their last test drive, seeing the mobile place we will be in a few minutes and the place to relax and debrief directly afterwards.

The handler waves us out to cars a few at a time, trying hard to keep us from getting run over. There’s another (sharply attired) Nissan person (they appeared to be all male) in the passenger seat. Right away I am shown how to get the car booted up and moving toward the cone course laid out on the parking lot. After going through some sharp curves at a fast walk, we line up to head out into city traffic. Six right hand turns later and we are back in the parking lot, slowly rolling under the “Thanks for Test Driving!” banner and parking for the next person.

I wanted to love this car so that I had a backup to the Volt. If the Volt can’t handle my daily driving entirely on the battery then I’m not really interested. I’ll have to wait. I was hoping that the Leaf would be a good second choice, but I don’t think I can get one. I suppose it is still a possibility, just not as large a one.

It all hinges on it feeling like a little econobox. If we don’t get a Volt we’ll probably keep the Prius for the occasional long drives up to Santa Barbara or out to the desert. That means we’d be trying to replace my wife’s Rav4 Electric. A hundred mile range would be an improvement, but the Rav4 feels safe. You’re up high, it’s not as lightweight a vehicle as a Miata or other little car, and if feels like you’d survive a collision with the thousands of SUVs careening around out there. The Leaf... not so much.

Even just playing with the static display pair, you could feel the difference in how a door shuts. One of the things I heard more than a few times from fellow CAB members while they were playing with the static display Volt was, “Listen to that door shut, that’s a solid car.” Well, yes. It’s heavier, more substantial construction, which is why the Leaf can eek out a hundred miles on a charge. So there’s a cost, both in real dollars (the Volt is about eight thousand more) and in range lost.

Here in Los Angeles you live in your car. Or die in it, I suppose. And the Nissan just didn’t feel like enough steel wrapped around me. If I were a twenty-something, or even a just-married couple, if I weren’t hauling around my children in the back seat, I would probably keep this car higher on my list.

It felt like a Nissan Vera level car with an electric motor. That’s a car that a lot of people car get excited about and I hope they sell tens of thousands of these. But it’s probably not for me. We’ll see after the Volt trial.

I will say that a corporation the size of GM should be horrible embarrassed about the show put on by Nissan. In comparison, I walked over to the Volt booth and it was just a couple little trade-show generic white tent shade structures, with a guy working a card table. And he had on a plain white shirt. I have a Volt shirt, can’t GM get him one?

This was the audience. These are AltCar (Alternative Fuel Car) enthusiasts, IN Southern California, in a zip code with an average income of over $200,000. These are the people GM should be selling this car to, and instead their booth looks on par with the Coda booth.

I hope the tour (that needs another post) is the start of a much more serious marketing effort.

So: Leaf, no. Nissan marketing, yes.