YOUNTVILLE, Calif.—Nissan arguably doesn't get nearly enough credit for mainstreaming the electric vehicle. Sure, Tesla made EVs cool among Silicon Valley's venture-capital set who aspire to a clean, fast, and prosperous future. And the Chevrolet Bolt is GM's second bite at the cherry that actually worked, proving all those EV-1s didn't die in vain. But since 2010, it's Nissan that has actually been selling the most cars, with more than 290,000 Leafs worldwide, 114,000 of them here in the US.
Now there's an all-new Leaf, one with better range, more power, better technology, and for less money than before. After spending the day driving one, I came away impressed.
New powertrain
The outgoing Leaf might have sold well, but there's no escaping the fact that, by 2017's standards, it was outdated technology. The electric motor has been carried over, but there's a new inverter, among other improvements. Power output is boosted from 80kW (107hp) to 110kW (147hp), and it's more torquey—320Nm (236ft-lbs) in the 2018 versus 254Nm (187ft-lbs) in the old model.
Previous Leafs launched with a 24kWh battery, and even when they were bumped mid-life to a 30kWh pack, their range was dwarfed by the Model S and then the Bolt. Lithium-ion know-how has come a long way since then, and so the second-generation Leaf now comes with a 40kWh pack, which means about 150 miles (241km) of range on a full charge. The new pack keeps the same footprint and still uses 192 cells, but now these are bundled as 24 modules of eight rather than 48 modules of four. A 60kWh, longer-range battery is in the pipeline, but we'll have to wait until model year 2019 for that one. Although Nissan says battery management is improved, we know that some people are still concerned that, without active thermal management, degradation over time will be more of a problem than it is for EVs from Tesla or GM.