Tell me, who wouldn’t want to pay triple the price of a Nissan Versa for this driving experience?:
Door to door, my drive to The Globe and Mail’s head office in downtown Toronto is about 35 kilometres each way, which should be fine for the Leaf. Still, I charged it from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. to ease any anxiety. When I left for work, the display in the dashboard reads 185 km of battery power. Confidence set in and I cranked up the heat and radio. But after only 10 kilometres on the highway, the battery capacity dropped to 100 km.
Anxiety set in. I turned off the heat and radio for the rest of the drive. I reached work with 85 km remaining – plenty of juice to get home. But the problem is there’s no place to recharge at work. And the battery range varies depending on the driving conditions, speed, weather, and temperature.
So, after a nine-hour work day with the Leaf sitting in the cold, I returned for the drive home. This time, I played it safe from the get-go – no radio, no seat warmers, no heat – only the wipers working intermittently as it rained. Eyes glued to the dash, the numbers dropped steadily. Relieved, I made it home with 23 km to spare. I was in the red zone, which means recharge as soon as possible. I breathed a sigh of relief and plugged it in immediately. Since the battery was almost fully drained, the display indicated that there was an estimated 21 hours to a 100 per cent charge.
This is the report by Toronto Globe and Mail reporter Petrina Gentile. 70 kilometers, by the way, is 43.5 miles. Gentile barely made that round trip, and had to do so without a heater running in Toronto, Canada in the late fall. As a reward, she lost access to the car for the next 21 hours, meaning, if she’d been an owner rather than a journalistic reviewer, she couldn’t have used the Leaf to go to and from work the next day!
As an illustration of the ideological power of the “electric” car, despite this objectively ridiculous performance, Gentile gives the Leaf a rating of 8.5 out of 10! She also echoes Nissan’s preposterous marketing claims by calling the Leaf “greener than green,” despite the importance of nuclear fission and hydrocarbon combustion in Canada’s electrical generation, despite the Leaf’s heavy reliance on scarce and precious minerals, and and despite the inherent insanity of using a 3,354-pound machine to take a single person to work and back.