
Nissan Tests 48 kWh Battery In Leaf - codex
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/10/24/nissan-tests-48-kwh-battery-leaf/
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pkulak
This is all much ado about nothing. Nissan put of bunch of cells in a Leaf for
one race. It's not like before this they didn't think they could, and just now
figured out how to... add more batteries. The 2014 model will not have twice
the range for the same price.

Nissan has a 24 kWh battery for a reason: they can sell the car, after
incentives, for about the price of a Prius. Doubling the pack would probably
add about 10 grand to the price. If Nissan thought that was where they wanted
to position themselves in the market, they would have done so already.

Though, personally, a 48 kWh Leaf would be pretty awesome. I'd pay an extra 10
grand for that. It would be a nice middle ground between an 80-grand Tesla and
the current Leaf.

~~~
Shivetya
If they would style it to look like a normal car, or offer a model that does,
say like their Altima I would seriously give it consideration.

The Leaf offers the range necessary for my daily commute, 53 miles. It just
doesn't do it in the looks department. Now a coupe would be a sweet ride,
provided it doesn't look odd.

~~~
scotth
If they styled it like a regular car, they might not sell as many, or for as
much. See: conspicuous conservation
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_conservation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_conservation))

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rdl
From my experience with 50-100 mile BMW 1e cars, I am pretty sure I'd require
at least 200 miles to be comfortable with a car in the Bay Area unless I had a
commute pattern with guaranteed charging both at home and at work (and went to
the primary work site and remained there most of the day). The "big" Tesla
seems like a much safer bet at 250-300 miles.

I guess a 48 KWh Leaf is about the same as the 60 KWh Tesla in range? (it
might not be; cheaper/lamer vs. physically larger but more advanced might be a
wash).

~~~
greglindahl
The Model S uses only 10% more energy than a Leaf to travel one mile. So, no.

~~~
rdl
Lease a leaf, buy a tesla seems like the best plan then. I suspect resale
value of tesla smokes the leaf.

I've never bought a new car, but 110k on an awd S p85+ actually seems like a
legitimate reason to borrow money at ?5%, assuming you drive a lot. Real
depreciation is probably way less than on a similar electric car, and if it is
just miles vs rough use or time, a battery/tire/brake swap should refurb bit
pretty completely after 150-200k miles in 4-5y. If you get reimbursed at
government rate for driving, ....

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LoneWolf
What every article like this and about any other EV fails to mention is how
many Km can it do before needing to be charged, how much is needed to charge,
etc. I'm sorry but that does not make me want to buy an EV not until I can get
easily all the numbers to compare properly.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Which EVs are you looking to have compared? I have the data locally for the
Nissan Leaf, all the Tesla versions, and the Chevy Volt. If you'd like this
data shown side-by-side, I'm more than happy to provide it. Also, if you want
a vehicle included I did not list, more than happy to provide that as well.

~~~
LoneWolf
I am speaking generally, everytime I try to compare them to gas or diesel cars
I don't have data for the EVs, if you could provide the data for the ones you
have I would appreciate.

~~~
toomuchtodo
You can use this US gov tool for side by side comparison between all vehicles
(gas vs gas, gas vs electric), just specify year, make, model of each vehicle:
[http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbsSelect](http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbsSelect)

I'm away from my laptop at the moment, but will get the data together as soon
as I'm back.

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maxharris
That's nice, but what about better styling?

Where I live, the Tesla model S outsells the Leaf by at least 20:1.

I know that the two cars are targeted at different market segments, and that
the model S is far more expensive. But that still doesn't explain why the Leaf
looks like a deformed catfish. Per unit, it doesn't take a significant amount
of money to make something beautiful.

Edit - here's some more evidence:

"Shoppers Say Chevy Volt Expensive, Nissan Leaf Ugly in Study"
[http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/01/shoppers-say-
chev...](http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/01/shoppers-say-chevy-volt-
expensive-nissan-leaf-ugly-in-study.html)

"Nissan Leaf. Another ugly EV."
[http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/nissan-leaf-
anothe...](http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/nissan-leaf-another-ugly-
ev-9505.html)

"Fiat calls out Nissan Leaf for being an ugly electric car"
[http://www.examiner.com/article/fiat-calls-out-nissan-
leaf-f...](http://www.examiner.com/article/fiat-calls-out-nissan-leaf-for-
being-an-ugly-electric-car)

~~~
cowmix
The Volt's prices has dropped 5K.. I think / hope it will sell a lot more now.

I've had my Volt for about 10K miles and I love it.

~~~
mikeash
The price drop certainly helps. My one remaining problem with the Volt is that
the back seat only seats two, not three.

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sliverstorm
Cool! Aside from price, range is the critical limiting factor in Leaf buying
decisions (to hear folks considering one). It doesn't have to get 300 miles to
the charge to be a good commuter replacement, but given that environment
conditions (e.g. winter, road speed) can decrease the current model's
effective range to below fifty miles, even moderate commutes can start pushing
your luck. A worst-case range of 100 miles should make it viable for all but
the farthest commutes.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The problem with the Leaf is that range is heavily constrained by hotel loads,
not the traction motor.

[http://insideevs.com/real-world-test-2013-nissan-leaf-
range-...](http://insideevs.com/real-world-test-2013-nissan-leaf-range-
vs-2012-nissan-leaf-range/)

A Leaf typically gets low 70s to high 80s in range, but as soon as you need AC
or heat for an extended duration, you've lost _a lot_ of that range (some
reports have put the range at only ~30 miles with hotel loads maxing out).

I'll be the first to admit I'm a huge Elon Musk fan (I also own several
thousand shares of TSLA stock). Putting the fanboy in me aside, I think Tesla
was correct in shooting for such large battery packs in their vehicle. It
greatly diminishes the range anxiety EV owners might feel. The other factor
you can't control for is that, in my opinion, if you own a Tesla its going to
be much easier for you to charge at your workplace or your home. You're
probably a high net worth individual who is going to have a much easier time
having chargers installed at home or work. Most Leaf owners I'd imagine (NO
DATA HERE, JUST MY ASSUMPTION) are city dwellers in condos or apartments where
its going to be much more difficult to get charging infrastructure installed
above a 15-20A/120V circuit.

~~~
tocomment
I wonder if anyone has considered putting a small heat pump into an EV instead
of resistive heating. That could save a lot of energy.

Perhaps cars will start having better insulation too? Double paned windows? To
be more efficient with cabin heating and cooling?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Tricks like that will work, but in the end, the best outcome is for battery
technology to advance.

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mikestew
Of course it's not like the bigger pack will be showing up in 2015 Leafs. I'm
guessing the test version has no rear seats or trunk space. It also wasn't a
test like "test this before it goes into production", the Leaf was modified
for a race. A stock Leaf won't make an hour running flat out (electronically
limited to 93mph). The bigger pack, as far as I can tell, was installed to
make it more competitive.

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ginko
Are there any projects for wireless charging while driving out there?

If you could somehow power a car while driving on the freeway, you would
essentially solve most range problems of electric cars.

~~~
toomuchtodo
While parked, yes. While driving, no. It would be extremely expensive to
repave roads to support this.

EDIT: Yes, you could wire roads only when already performing needed repairs.
Yes, you could run wires above roads for power. But why? All of these miles we
have of infrastructure, it'll be faster to continue to drive down the cost of
battery technology to the point where people will say, "Can you believe we
even considered wiring roads?".

My opinion is that battery technology is going to follow that same cost curve
as solar modules:
[http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/countyfair/...](http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/countyfair/solarplummetingcost.jpg)

Within 5-10 years the cost of battery technology _should_ have fallen to where
the cost of the battery is marginal. The trick is to get the cost of the cells
down, while reducing the need for so much manual labor to assemble the packs
from cells. My hope is that Tesla comes up with a way to automate pack
assembly or 3D prints the entire pack, cells and all (perhaps not "print", but
laser sinter).

~~~
ginko
> Within 5-10 years the cost of battery technology should have fallen to where
> the cost of the battery is marginal.

The problem with batteries isn't so much the cost as their weight. There is a
limit to the power density of current battery technology and nothing really in
the pipeline to greatly improve on this.

So installing a higher-capacity battery also means having a heavier car, which
in turn requires more power to keep it moving.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I'd love to have a gentleman's bet on this :) I bet you a beverage of your
choice (I know we're not all craft beer aficionados) that within 10 years, the
cost of batteries will have halved, and their capacity will have doubled.

I try to put my money where my mouth is; when Tesla went IPO, I bought several
thousand shares of stock. I'm holding for the long term, as I think they're
not just going to revolutionize mobility, but also battery technology.

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chmullig
Am I wrong to be annoyed that they're ripping off the Ars Technica brand?

~~~
jrockway
You do know that "Technica" is Latin for technology, right? Ars was not the
first English language publication to notice this. There are hundreds of
others, including this one, "Clean Technica". (The truly non-lazy would have
probably figured out the Latin word for clean and used that, but...)

Your argument is like complaining that _The_ New York Times ripped off _The_
Washington Post's "the" brand.

~~~
maxharris
If I were to create a startup incubator called "C Combinator," that would be
as massive a ripoff as "cleantechnica.com" is.

Most people (myself included) don't know Latin. The number of people that know
Latin probably outnumbers the number of people that have heard of Haskell
Curry, but both cases are the same in a crucial respect: some guy sees an
interesting name/domain, and creates a ripoff site that rides off of the trail
blazed by the originator. The fact that they didn't translate "clean" into
Latin makes this conclusion inescapable for me.

Here's the damage that the ripoff does: "Hmm - _clean_ technica.com? That's
probably a 'clean'-tech site made by the Arstechnica guys. I love Ars, so I'll
go there and check it out." Suppose that cleantechnica.com puts up
misinformation, which people attribute to Arstechnica, which causes people to
reduce their visits to both sites - that's not good. True, not everyone will
make that mistake. Arstechnica was there first, and the ripoff site should
have to bear the costs of clearing up the confusion they've created.

