Technologies notwithstanding, there are really only two types of electric cars: real cars, which the manufacturers hope to sell in mass quantities, and compliance cars, which the manufacturers hope will get California off their backs. Green Car Congress explains the difference:

We’d suggest that any plug-in car has to meet the following criteria before it can be considered real:

• It’s sold outright to consumers, not only leased; and
• It will sell at least 5,000 or more a year in the U.S. or reach total global sales of 20,000; and
• It’s offered outside the “California emissions” states, or will be within 18 months

Any car that doesn’t meet those tests at a minimum isn’t a serious volume car; it’s either part of a test fleet or it exists just to comply with the [California zero-emissions vehicles] requirement.

The Nissan Leaf, for instance, has achieved Real status: it will sell in five figures this year in the US and can be had for purchase at pretty much any Nissan store you can name. Honda’s Fit EV, not so much:

Honda obligingly revealed that it would lease the Fit EV for $399 a month (on a base price of $36,625), but not offer it for sale.

And, it said, it plans to offer only 1,100 of them from 2012 through 2014, starting in California and Oregon this summer, expanding into six East Coast markets next year.

The very model of a modern for-compliance car.

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

Optional engines are still the rule rather than the exception in the American car market: almost everything passing itself off as a “family” sedan comes with a base inline-four, though a few grand extra will get you a V6 or at least a turbo for that four, and pickup buyers revel in their ability to select exactly the right engine for what they imagine are their needs.

The hybrids and the electrics, up to now, hadn’t offered such options. Tesla’s upcoming Model S has the same 300-kW (about 400 hp) motor throughout the line. However, Tesla will be offering three different battery packs: the larger the pack, the greater the range and the higher the performance. The base version ($50k after the Federal tax credit) gets a 40-kWh pack, reportedly good for 0-60 in 6.5 seconds and a range of 165 miles. Ante up another ten grand and get the 65-kWh pack, cutting 0.6 seconds off zero-to-sixty and extending range to 230 miles. Yet another ten grand will bring you the 85-kWh pack, bringing you to a 300-mile range and slicing 0-60 to 5.6. (There’s a “performance” version beyond that, with a high-performance inverter, that drops 0-60 into the mid-fours.) The best-selling pure-electric, the Nissan Leaf, comes with a modest 24-kWh battery pack; Chevrolet’s Volt carries 16 kWh.

All the Tesla battery packs will carry an 8-year warranty, though only the 85-kWh version specifies unlimited mileage.

(See also the pricing analysis at The Truth About Cars.)

You don’t hear that around gas stations anymore, and you definitely won’t hear it in connection with electric cars.

Oh, wait:

[A] gas station in Tennessee has become what we think is the country’s first gas station to offer a chademo rapid-charging station alongside its gasoline pumps.

Murphy Express Gas on Lee Highway in Chattanooga, Tennessee has installed the charger as part of a test program into electric car charging. If successful, it will install rapid charging stations at some of its other gas stations.

“Chademo,” usually styled CHAdeMO, is a specific quick-charge protocol — not quite a standard — which uses high-voltage DC to charge electric vehicles in a fraction of the time it takes when they’re pluged into typical wall outlets. The only current (sorry about that) vehicles that can take advantage of this protocol are Nissan’s Leaf and the upcoming Mitsubishi i, which can juice up to 80 percent of maximum in half an hour.

For now, Murphy isn’t even charging people for the charge.

Kim Reynolds drove a Chevrolet Volt from Detroit to Los Angeles for the October issue of Motor Trend, and the general dearth of charging stations along the way prompted this tongue-in-cheek observation:

Nissan Leaf drivers attempting to cross the country might be the solution to our nation’s dwindling rural population. Eventually, they’ll become stranded far from the coast’s handy plugs, and be forced to find an apartment and a job.

At least, I think it was tongue-in-cheek.

We’ve been hearing so long about how electric cars are going to save us from a horrible environmental fate that we may have overlooked one minor detail. Stephen Smith of Market Urbanism, however, didn’t:

I’m not going to lay out a long case against electric cars right now, but suffice it to say I think they’re just another subsidy to the auto-based system, and that the true environmental harm in cars is not their actual emissions, but the land use patterns that they necessitate, and an electric battery doesn’t change this one bit.

Imagine this little scenario at breakfast:

Spouse 1: So this little Nissan Leaf can do 70 miles on a single charge?

Spouse 2: I’d bet more like 55 or 60 if the weather’s nasty, but nobody really knows for sure.

Spouse 1: Still, even with a 55-mile range, we could buy that house out there on 220th Street and still be within commuting distance.

For those who insist that we need to bring people back to the urban core, this has all the makings of a Step Backwards.

Nissan says the Leaf has now sold over 4,000 copies, and has revealed a few bits of demographic information.

Of most interest to me is whether the buyers are using it as their primary vehicle or simply as a commuter/grocery-getter. Says Nissan, most of the buyers are getting by with just the Leaf, though 19 percent of Leafs share a garage with a Toyota Prius. And owners of other Nissan vehicles aren’t flocking to the Leaf: only 14 percent of Leaf buyers are previous Nissan owners. Clearly this is a case where product characteristics outweigh considerations of brand loyalty.

Range anxiety seems to be a minor concern at best: most Leaf drivers travel about 60 miles a day, well within the car’s range — in coastal California, anyway. In places where it gets really cold, the range is reduced a bit. (Damn you, laws of physics!)

The typical Leaf driver, says Nissan, has an annual income of somewhere around $140k, implying that he can afford the two grand for the 220/240V, 40-amp home charging station, which is twice as fast as merely plugging the car into the nearest 110-volt outlet. Then again, given the cost of living in coastal California — but never mind, we won’t go there.

I have never had much faith in dashboard MPG readings, having seen both 60 and 6 mpg during the same trip in a borrowed Infiniti G35. Apparently Nissan hasn’t learned anything, according to Kim Reynolds at Motor Trend (8/11):

[T]he Leaf’s [range] display is virtually an info-slinky. Pull away from the charger with an indicated 106-mile range, and it’ll drop eight miles by the end of the block. I found myself finally ignoring the numbers and counting the remaining battery bar-graph segments, but even this is iffy as, per Mike Duoba of Argonne National Lab, “a battery is like a rubber bucket.”

The EV blog Electric Cars are for Girls attempts to explain this phenomenon:

Most of the confusion in the computer calculated range is that it constantly recalculates available range based on whether you’re going fast or slow or up or down hill. It figures that say you’re presently going up a two mile grade that your range based on that climb until your batteries are depleted. (It doesn’t know it’s only for two miles.) As soon as you reach the top and go down the other side it recalculates based on the down hill and your range goes back up again. You just have to understand how it thinks and you will get that light bulb moment and not worry.

Emphasis added. Okay, fair enough. Obviously Nissan can’t make these things psychic.

Then again, back to Reynolds in MT:

Unless you drive like a maniac, if the Volt’s display says it will go 37 miles in EV mode, it’ll deliver between 36 and 38.

What is Chevy doing right?

It seems to me that a lot of the so-called “range anxiety” associated with electric cars might be due to the fact that it takes so long to recharge them: There’s a quick (30-minute) charger for Leafs (Leaves?) at Nissan dealerships in Japan, but it costs a dealer upward of $15,000, so it’s not really an investment for civilians. Besides, at the slowest gas station I know, I can fill up my current car in nine minutes or so.

Which statistic, if this pans out, won’t impress (or depress) anyone with an electric car anymore:

Mr. Kanno of the Japanese company Energy Use Technology Research K.K. has reportedly received a patent for a system that can charge a typical electric vehicle in about five minutes. Five minutes, you ask? Yes. Five minutes.

Mr. Kanno’s breakthrough idea, according to Integrity Exports, came when he realized recharging was ultimately limited by the capacity of the electrical cables. Therefore, Mr. Kanno’s patented technology constantly collects electrical power from the grid and delivers it to plug-in vehicles in a five-minute burst.

Must be some humongous capacitors in there somewhere. (Or not; “electrical engineer” is yet another position for which I am not qualified.)

In a piece called “The EV Expectation Gap,” The Truth About Cars editor Edward Niedermeyer reproduces this graph from an Accenture study, and it looks to me like electric cars like Nissan’s Leaf are going to have a whole lot of trouble selling to anyone beyond committed green folk:

Survey respondents evidently want a single charge to last for eight days’ worth of driving.

One current EV — Tesla’s $100k-plus Roadster — claims a range close to 400 km, though it seats only two, snugly, and cargo space is theoretical at best. And while it does zero to sixty in a shade under four seconds, actually verifying this for yourself will cut into that range rather substantially.

The Chevrolet Volt, with its gasoline-engine backup, can actually pull off something close to a 400-km range for less than half what Tesla asks for the Roadster, and it seats four. I suppose there might be EV purists out there who reject the Volt because it occasionally burns some gasoline, and premium gasoline at that. If there’s a lot of them, Niedermeyer’s conclusion seems inevitable:

[T]here’s a giant disconnect (nearly ten-fold in fact) between the actual number of kilometers driven each day and the range expectations for future EV purchases. Meanwhile, 62% of respondents rejected battery swapping, the most credible current solution for range anxiety, for reasons that are not immediately clear. In short, Energy Secretary Chu had better be right when he says EV range will triple and costs will be reduced over the next six years… otherwise, EVs will die a quick death at the hand of consumers’ outsized range expectations.

And this time they won’t be able to blame General Motors.

Addendum: “In a land where 40-mile commutes are a lot more common than 4-mile ones, the Nissan Leaf has a tough row to hoe.”

A pissing match between Nissan and General Motors? Oh, what fun. Here’s the background:

Back in October, General Motors began airing a series of commercials based around the Chevrolet Volt’s then-new tagline: “More Car Than Electric.” The commercials that later aired for Chevy’s plug-in took a subtle dig at pure electric cars like the Nissan Leaf, while attempting to explain the benefits of range-extended technology.

Nissan did not respond until last week, when one of their execs said this in a speech:

As automakers, we have a duty to communicate with clarity to help customers understand today’s technology. If you’re calling your car electric, and it has one of these, you’re only muddling the message.

“These” were a tailpipe and muffler, which the Volt of course has, since it has an actual engine stuck in there among all the electricals.

Then again, the Leaf has a valve cover but no actual valves, so who’s zooming whom?

Lauren Harger tweeted this earlier today:

Notice how “green” car names sound so wimpy? Prius sounds like Prissy and Wuss. And the Leaf? Can you get more inanimate than that?

Jonathan Richman’s Dodge Veg-O-Matic was pretty inanimate, despite its industrial-sounding name.

Still, you have to figure that this is a case of Know Your Audience: no one in the history of the world ever cross-shopped the Prius against, say, the late, lamented Mercury Marauder. And you can be sure that John Q. Hypermiler isn’t buying a Prius to go hooning around.

Besides, none of Toyota’s vehicle lines, from misty Avalon to lumpy Yaris, carries a name that sounds the least bit menacing, with the possible exception of the home-market Harrier, which came here as the Lexus RX. (Nissan, which issues vehicles with such names as Armada, Titan, and Rogue, is apparently less concerned with appearing more concerned.)

And suppose we’d had the technology much earlier. Could there have been, say, a ’62 Buick Electrodyne?

The very first owner of a US-spec Nissan Leaf reports on his experiences so far, and I have to admit, I smiled at this:

A [VW] GTI slowed down as I was coming back from San Jose today. I had to accelerate to 80 miles per hour to pass it again to kill the myth that electric cars are slow, but battery range was getting low, so I went back to 65 mph soon after.

Having received comparable instructions from a Prius driver once upon a time (see last paragraph), I can relate.

The Nissan Leaf is an electric vehicle; it has no pistons, no cylinders, no valves.

It does, however, have a valve cover:

David Vespremi sees a cultural precedent for this sort of atavistic throwback:

When the television was introduced, and for literally decades afterwards, it was not uncommon for them to be housed in wooden cabinets or, in later, years, to come with faux wood finishes. The thinking was, the TV was something new and alien. So, to integrate it with our lives and, indeed, the fabric of our society, it needed first and foremost to integrate with our living rooms. Ergo, the TV became a piece of wooden furniture.

So the Leaf, inevitably, is a bit closer to Studebaker than to Star Trek. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this. If this is the powerplant of the future, it seems like it ought to look futuristic, but I hate it every time I pop the hood of a car and nothing looks familiar. So maybe this is Nissan’s sop to saps like me.

Now that the first year’s Nissan Leaf production is pretty much spoken for, it’s apparently safe to let it be known that the electric car’s information center runs Windows:

[T]he 2011 Nissan LEAF touchscreen information hub is powered by Windows Embedded Automotive technology, providing drivers and passengers with a navigation system and electricity charging station locator. It also shares power consumption monitoring information with drivers, and enables easy in-car climate monitoring.

On the upside, it presumably reboots every time you push the Start button.

A chap using the handle “vin7619″ sends some advice to Nissan on how to market the Leaf, an all-electric zero-emissions vehicle:

Don’t be afraid to market to the mainstream by emphasizing handling, acceleration, and comfort. However, to appeal to this much bigger market, you have to make an economic argument and forget the save the world nonsense. Stress lower fuel costs and lower maintenance costs. Fund a survey that compares the costs of an EV versus ICE and throw lower maintenance costs into the equation (I haven’t seen this mentioned yet in comparisons sponsored by the traditional auto makers).

To some extent, Nissan understands this: the most recent print ad I saw for the Leaf was all about torque. (As rival Mazda is wont to say, “Zoom zoom.”) Suggestion: a pitch containing the phrase “fewer moving parts.” Heck, my car has two dozen presumably-pricey valves. Nobody likes replacing parts on modern-day Incomprehensimobiles.

Further suggestion: Since the Leaf is considered a zero-emissions vehicle — yeah, I know, all that electricity comes from a power plant somewhere — the main reason for the infamous Malfunction Indicator Light (aka “Check Engine Light”), failure to meet emissions specs, ceases to exist. If you hate the MIL as much as I do, you’ll see this as a sure-fire selling point.

As for our writer’s motivation, he’s up front about it:

In offering this advice, I’m not being altruistic. I want to see electric cars take over the world so we can tell the loose collection of mental patients in the Middle East to pound sand. I also want to make a lot of money on Nissan stock.

Works for me, at least until my next road trip. Maybe by then they’ll have chargers every few miles.

Nobody questions whether the Tesla Roadster acts like a real car on the road: they assume that since it costs $120,000 or so, these matters have been adequately addressed by the manufacturer.

Nissan’s asking about a quarter of that for the new Leaf, which may explain their current print ad, apparently intended to assure potential buyers that yes, their little electric car can get out of its own way:

max torque — it’s that fleeting moment when a gasoline engine is strongest. unfortunately it takes a while to get there. wait no more: the Nissan LEAF electric motor gets 100% torque right off the line. so the moment you step on the pedal, wahooooo!

My own gas-engine car, powered by Nissan, reaches its torque peak at a relatively-lofty 4000 rpm, and it does take a few seconds to get there — though in the interest of fuel economy, unless you’re really pushing on the loud pedal, you’ll get an upshift long before you get there. An electric motor reaches its torque peak at zero rpm: it’s pretty much instantaneous.

I suppose the best thing about this is that Nissan is not going to try to sell the Leaf as an automotive hair shirt, to be worn in penance for all those years you wheeled around town in a bitchin’ Camaro, but as a car that can actually be enjoyed, provided you don’t have to drive all the way to, say, Wahoo, Nebraska in a single day. (Eventually, I suppose, there will be fast-charge stations along the highway.)

Well, okay, not yet they aren’t. But they’re up to something with that new electric car of theirs:

“From now on, we will market cars based on the value of the information they provide,” said Toru Futami, expert leader at Nissan’s IT & ITS engineering department to the Nikkei.

Details are as shady as the exact location of the data center. The Nikkei could divine that “by connecting the facility and its cars through a high-speed wireless network, Nissan is able to receive driving information in real time. The system enables the driver to easily get information about such things as traffic jams and the location of charging stations.” Hmm. Big deal. Here’s another one:

“Because the data center stores a vast amount of information, including the number of times the car battery has been recharged, drivers will be able to calculate such things as how many more years a battery can be used and what value to place on it when the car is resold.”

Then again, what you really want to know about a used car you’re considering is something they’re not mentioning: whether the previous owner engaged in wholesale hoonage. It seems to me that it wouldn’t be any more difficult to track zero-to-sixty-to-whatever bursts than battery charge cycles.

And I suspect it wouldn’t require rocket science to divert this information to, um, interested third parties.