In which I compare my new 2012 Nissan Leaf with my previous car, a 1988 Toyota Corolla. I feel like I've finally joined the 21st Century. And with my solar panels coming in January, then I'll feel like I'm finally enough of an environmentalist.
Read on below the orange cloud of exhaust . . .
This 2012 Nissan Leaf SL leapfrogged me so far forward in technology from Mia, my '88 Corolla, that it's difficult to convey properly.
Mia was a great car. I named her after the main character in Bruce Sterling's excellent novel, Holy Fire. I replaced her engine/clutch/carburetor because she was in such great shape at 149k miles, which for about $2,000 then gave me 93k more miles at almost zero maintenance or depreciation, paying <$300/year on insurance and averaging 33MPG overall. Mia was a well preserved, sensible old lady, who never went too quickly or took risks. As a 4-door compact sedan she could carry 5 passengers and still fit into the smallest of parking spaces.
If Mia were WALL-E, the Leaf is EVA. Being all electric provides the Leaf many ancillary advantages and conveniences. You folks all take for granted features like automatic windows and door locks, but I've never had them before. Where Mia had cranks for things like the parking brake, the Leaf has an electric button.
Keyless entry feels like true 21st century luxury. Because it detects the fob in my pocket, I never need to remove it. The locked doors open at my touch. It knows you don't want to lock yourself out of your car, and will refuse to do so. It even knows whether the front passenger is heavy enough to merit the multiple airbags.
The Leaf seems smart in other ways too, through idiot proofing and deskilling. It not only knows never to leave the headlights on after I turn the car off (sorry Mia), it also knows when to turn them on! The Leaf can answer and handle my phone calls, read my music library through a USB port, open my garage door, navigate me anywhere (with a shortcut to find the nearest charging station), and tell my computer (or smart phone that I'm too cheap to buy) its status.
Mia used a carburetor, which is just one step above a choke for you old-timers. The Leaf boots up at the push of a button in about 2-3 seconds, and you never need to warm the motor up.
Mia never generated heat until I got on the highway, making all city drives cold in the winter. On this Leaf, you can turn on the climate controls in your car from the internet, either on a whim or a timer so that it gets to your preferred temperature before you even get in. This is hilarious overkill for me, since the Leaf has seatwarmers in front and back that heat up in seconds. The steering wheel heater cures your cold hands to ensure that you are spoiled.
People ask me how it handles. It has new car handling. Like, if you are driving straight and you let go of the steering wheel, you continue to go straight.
When you stomp on the accelerator (formerly known as "gas pedal") it pauses for one second and then zooms like a bat out of hell. You can set it to eco mode to give it 10% extra range if you lack the self-control to drive mellowly, and even then you never struggle to maintain or increase speed. Mia made me downshift on every hill, like I was the tiniest semi on the road.
Mia had 5 speeds and a manual transmission, a WW2 technology. The Leaf doesn't shift at all, unless you count reverse. It doesn't know what RPMs are. Due to the constant torque available, the cruise control keeps perfect speed up and down hills.
The display has a gauge that measures how hard the engine is working (or regenerating) at any given moment, which helps guide you if you want to drive efficiently, either to maximize range and battery longevity or to minimize energy use and range anxiety. On the highway, I enjoy the cruise control which lets me accelerate and decelerate with my thumb. Pushing it up really zips it up faster, and pushing it down engages the regenerative braking such that I don't often have to actually touch the brake pedal. I've gone from operating all 3 of Mia's foot pedals down to a single soft thumb switch in the Leaf (but watch out, pushing it in honks the horn).
The brake pedal, like so many other aspects of the Leaf, require no skill, so you can always just stomp on it fearlessly, and it will automatically make the best of it. This intelligent traction control reminds me of Y.T.'s skateboard in Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash. With Mia in the winter, the brakes threatened to slide her out of control if I didn't use them artfully. No traffic camera is going to catch this Leaf on a snowy evening (though I did defend Mia successfully from the ticket).
I kept only a cheap stereo in Mia, since the road noise would render a quality sound system pointless and a subwoofer almost understandable. The Leaf is so whisper quiet that any stereo would have sounded euphonious by comparison. But just to make sure you appreciate the near silence of the cabin, Nissan stocked it with a Bose that sounds better than anything I would have considered buying.
Sure, a pure electric zero emission car only works for a car-light lifestyle like my wife and I have, but it meets all our needs to get to and from Denver and such for our choral gigs. For years now, I've been longing for the day in which I could scoff, "Hybrids are for liberals." I just never imagined the wretched affluence that would envelop me while doing so.