Can Road Trippers Embrace Nissan's New 100% Electric LEAF?

August 3, 2009 at 9:28 AM | by Omri | 0 Comments

Another day, another sleek electric car with a futuristic design and eye-popping mileage. This time it's Nissan unveiling their slick new, purely electric LEAF. 100 miles on a single charge and a mere 30 minutes to recharge via a specialized charging station. No hybrid engine so zero emissions. Who wouldn't want to get in on some of this environmental goodness?

For starters, anyone who uses their car for road trips. The Midwest isn't exactly a forest of recharging stations, and even electric cars stop moving when they run out of juice. It takes 16 hours to recharge the LEAF on a standard household plug away from home. It's simply impossible for environmentally-conscious road trippers to go greener than hybrids.

The way we travel was different a few years back, before the recession; people drove their cars inside cities and took airplanes when they wanted to leave. The recession has however caused more and more Americans to choose the road over the friendly skies. The traditional response from pure electric advocates — "how many road trips do people really go on after they get out of college?" — just doesn't work any more.

This unfortunately means there's a tradeoff between the tangible environmental benefits of going totally electric now and the medium-term benefits of having a robust hybrid market.

The financial incentives get kind of screwy here. The LEAF promises to undercut hybrid models like the Prius but be on par with combustible engine models. Nissan also plans to lease the LEAF's fuel cells, promising that the cost of refilling them will more or less match the average cost of gas. But gas in remote areas is cheaper and, more importantly, plentiful.

Electric car owners will be locked in the cities and out of any non-air travel. This is bad. People who insist on taking road trips will have to rely on gas guzzlers. This is even worse.

The LEAF is a green marketing scheme and not an economic appeal, and we understand that. It's not targeted at travelers, and we get that too. But charging stations will never sprout in the flyover states until masses of hybrid-driving road trippers can leapfrog into stations that have chargers and supplement their tanks with gas in between. As travelers interested in eventually going coast-to-coast on electricity, we're at the very least torn about Nissan's total leap into the electric car market.

Disagree with our cost-benefit calculus? Think the world needs to go as green as possible as fast as possible? Sound off in the comments and let us know!

Related Stories:
· Nissan Unveils the All-Electric LEAF to the World (Exclusive Photos) [Treehugger]
· Road Trips Coverage [Jaunted]
· Rental Cars Coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: Nissan USA]

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