Nissan Leaf charges into UK car showrooms

High hopes for green motoring as UK's first mass-produced electric vehicle hits dealerships

• Testdriving the Nissan Leaf
Fiona Harvey and Adam Vaughan guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 March 2011 13.46 GMT
Their sometimes clunky designs, short range between recharges and super-car price tags have put many drivers off buying an electric car. But that could soon change with the launch of the UK's first mass-produced electric vehicle.

The Nissan Leaf, an all-electric family car with the performance of a Ford Focus but a fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions, is delivered to UK dealerships today.

More than 600 fans of greener driving have been waiting since last September to get their hands on the Leaf, one of only a handful of electric vehicles available in the UK.

Mark Goodier, the Smooth Radio DJ, is one of the first. "The great thing about electric cars is that the fuel distribution is already in place," he said. "We all have mains electricity at home. We have it at work and councils are already working on how to install thousands of charging points at the roadside. You can see why electric vehicles make such sense, particularly in towns and cities."

At £30,990, the Leaf is at the expensive end of the family car budget, but drivers can claim a £5,000 government grant towards the cost. They are also exempt from road tax and congestion charges, and if it is used as a company car, it is not taxed as a benefit-in-kind and the employer pays no national insurance contributions on it.

A full charge will last for about 110 miles, Nissan calculates, and cost about £2 in electricity. That compares with about £12 for 110 miles for a petrol-driven car of a similar size. Even with George Osborne's budget give-away to "Ford Focus families", in the form of a 1p cut to fuel duty announced on Wednesday, switching to an electric car is likely to save the average driver more than £1,500 a year.

Ministers are hoping that the wider availability of electric cars will help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport, which will be essential to meeting climate change targets. They also hope to spark investment in a new manufacturing industry. While the Leafs being driven out of dealerships this week were built in Japan, from 2013 they will be built at the Nissan plant in Sunderland.

Other electric cars available in the UK include the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, the Smart Fortwo electric drive, the Peugeot iOn and Citroen C-Zero, but some are limited to leasing deals at present. More are scheduled to follow, including the Chevrolet Volt and Tata Vista.

But the electric "revolution" in driving has got off to a slow start. Only 55 electric cars were sold in the UK in 2009, though that was before the government's new grants took effect. The government's climate advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, says the country needs 1.7m of them on the roads by 2020 to help meet the country's tough carbon targets.

This year is not likely to prove a breakthrough, despite the new cars reaching garages, according to Andrew Close, European manager for powertrain forecasts at IHS Global Insight. "It might be the first year people notice electric cars driving around – normal people rather than G-Wiz owners," he said.

"But 2011 will not see any breakthrough in volume [of cars on the road], though it will be a considerable jump from before. 2011 is way too early, £5,000 or not – the vehicles are expensive, constrained in supply and there are still too many good [conventional car] alternatives."

Fans of greener cars are happy with their expanded choice, though. Richard Todd, a silicon chip designer from St Albans, used to drive a Toyota Prius, a hybrid half-electric and half-petrol car. "As an engineer I have always wanted an electric car – I've just had to wait for the battery technology to arrive," he said. "Hybrids are good but the driving experience of an all-electric vehicle is way beyond this."

A comprehensive charging network is currently under development in the UK, and Nissan's network of EV dealers – currently 26 sites nationwide – will be equipped with a quick charger, which will charge the battery from zero to 80% capacity in under 30 minutes. Across the UK there are programmes under way to install around 9,000 charge points by 2013.

Why don't governments push for more hydrogen cars?

The much-heralded 'hydrogen economy' never appears to get out of first gear. Are our politicians failing us by not pushing harder for hydrogen-powered cars?

Leo Hickman guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 March 2011 10.27 GMT
Why don't governments push for more use of hydrogen-powered vehicles?

Ashraf Abdo, via Facebook


We seem to have been talking about the "hydrogen economy" for well over a decade now, but, like so many other saviour technologies, its arrival never seems to get any closer.

Yes, there have been the showcasing examples of the Honda FCX Clarity and the CUTE (Clean Urban Transport for Europe) bus trials in London. But without the infrastructure to produce and distribute hydrogen as a fuel, these vehicles are little more than curios.

It is significant, too, that talk of hydrogen seems to have dampened down in the US. After President Bush announced in 2003 that hydrogen-powered cars would be at heart of how America weaned itself off oil, the Obama administration has pulled back from promoting the technology with energy secretary Steven Chu stating in 2009 that support for research programmes would be curtailed because the government was "moving away from funding vehicular hydrogen fuel cells to technologies with more immediate promise".

Are our governments making a mistake by not investing much further in hydrogen? Or are there too many problems with the technology to see it becoming a genuine rival to oil as a transportation fuel?

This column is an experiment in crowd-sourcing a reader's question, so please let us know your views and experiences below (as opposed to emailing them) and I will join in with some of my own thoughts and reactions as the debate progresses. I will also be inviting various interested parties to join the debate too.

• Please send your own environment question to ask.leo.and.lucy@guardian.co.uk.
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