Leaf battery and plug

I had 2 questions come up repeatedly:

1. How big is the battery? I hadn't really thought about it, so we popped the hood and looked. I guess everyone was thinking that to power a whole car it would be the size of a cooler. It wasn't.
It looked regular-sized, but slightly narrower.

2. How do you plug it in. Easy. Just pop open the small door in the hood and you snap in the plug. The other end has the regular 120 volt 3-pronged plug you have in garages and home. The other plug in the hood is where you snap in the 240 volt plug when charging it at work in the specially designed charging stations (the plugs you have for your washer or oven).

Ed Cassavoy
Senior Editor, Special Sections

Nissan Leaf, Power Anxiety

After the initial fun of driving around in a car that hums, you start trying to figure how it will work into your real life.

* Power anxiety dominates every drive. Turn the car on, look at the gauge showing how many klicks before the car goes dead.

* Every trip, you check the gauge to see what you have left - it slips away very fast.

I drove the car around Scarborough for about 4 hours on Saturday, then plugged it in for the afternoon. It had about 50 km left, but I was getting more anxious. You start paying attention to all those little dashes around the city. They add up.

After 3 days of doing regular errands, mostly in the east end, I did find myself wondering how to cut back on the drives. Some were a waste or could have been grouped together to save gas, but I was in a hurry, so I burned the fuel to save time.

It gets you thinking about how to do things different or atleast the cost of your choices.

It also feels like you have have this giant, imaginary chord connecting your car to the house (or more accurately, the power plug) as you can't get too far from the source of power.

Ed Cassavoy
Senior Editor, Special Sections

Questions that popped up

Lorna Higgins, Vanessa Pukal and Emery Niles gave the Leaf a top to bottom inspection Sunday in Scarborough.

I had a bunch of people ask about the car. Here are some of the comments:

A lady at Bluffer's Park asks me if the Star can get delivered to the houseboats

A guy with a white curly haired dog is sympathetic when he sees me pulling a parking ticket off the car in the Beaches on Sunday. I had no change in the car (it's not mine) so I had to go buy batteries to get change and as I come back to the car I see the Green Hornet passing. All of 5 minutes.

I ask him if he's been ticketing the cars, but from the sour expression, I can see he's not giving me a break though I explain the situation, show him my ticket-stamped receipt for batteries from a store a dozen paces away, the batteries in the other hand with the precious change.

No luck. I grab the ticket off the windshield and the guy with the dog just laughs and asks how many dogs can fit in the trunk. I take a stab at it and guess three Labradors - and he nods and says "that's about right."

I'm assuming that's adequate for most dog-situations.

* One lady in Scarborough wonders how you could commute in it. She wonders if the string of new service centres built along Highway 401 should have electric plug-in stations installed. Sounds like a good question.

* A UofT student asks if they're installed in condo buildings. Nope, no laws requiring it, though this is clearly an urban centre car. Why not? They do in B.C. and Quebec, but not Ontario. Seems like a good idea even as Toronto's skyline is dominated by a dozen cranes that loom over new downtown condo projects.

* A little girl asks if the police have electric cars. They are so quiet, wouldn't they be good to sneak up on crooks? I start thinking about other uses for a car in places or situations when being quiet is an asset.

* Another gent sees the car at a Scarborough mall and asks why they don't have solar panels installed as well. Wouldn't it help?

* What's it made of - someone figures it's some sort of composite material.

* A lady asks me what happens if it runs out of power - can the CAA boost it? Another good question.

As Wheels.ca digs deeper into the electric car debate we'll hopefully get you some of these answers...so please keep an eye out for Barney or Fred and tell us what you think.

Ed Cassavoy
Senior Editor, Special Sections

Nissan Leaf - Operation shove things in it

Nissan Leaf - Operation shove things in it

The Nissan Leaf is comfy, but can I fill it with stuff? My goal is to test its fillability.

- Kids vs dogs
- bulky stuff
- my neighbour Emery down the street has lots of odd gear to test
- maybe shove Emery in the car as well, just for fun

Can it pass muster with the weekend challenges faced by every family?

- My wife gives me the gears when I back the car in so the front end is facing out to the street so everyone can't help but notice this odd plug-in arrangement with the car.
- OK sure, a bit of electro-bragging but it's the eco-cool equivalent of revving the engine.
"Hey check out that guy's plug-in" ....hmmm, I guess it doesn't roll off the tongue with the same macho ring to it.

Ed Cassavoy
Senior Editor, News and Special Sections (Travel,Wheels,Real Estate)
The Toronto Star

Leaf roaming east end

Whizzed down to Bluffer's Park, decided to see how quiet this car really is and snuck up so close to snoozing seagulls in the parking lot we could smell the garbage on their breath.

As I attempted to nudge the car close to the Bluffer's Park sign, a nice lady pulled up in a clattering diesel - I was braced for car queries but she just wanted to know if she could get the Star delivered to the houseboats. Working on that.

Ed Cassavoy
Senior Editor, Special Sections

Nissan Leaf has plenty of surge for me

I'm not a car guy.

People ask me what kind of car have you got? And I answer a black one. That's about the extent of my
"Wheels" knowledge.
 
My first car was a 2nd-hand Morris 1000, which got me across town and back and that's all I ask even
today. That's good, because it's all the Leaf delivers. Back and forth across town.

3 good things:

- It's got a surge, nice for zipping in and out of traffic going up and down Mount Pleasant or even the
DVP.

 - Plenty of stretch-out space inside.
 
- When it's parked, people want to know what-on-earth is that? There's big curiousity and it's fun to answer questions.
  
3 not-so-good things:
 
 - The short range scares me. I'd have to carefully plan a Saturday morning outing, even to a GTA golf
course.
 
- The silence takes a while to get used to, although I suppose a Rolls-Royce drives just as quietly.
 
- The instrument panel is confusing and I got lost on the GPS.

Michael Cooke.
Editor, Toronto Star

 

Chevy Volt, an electric road trip to Parry Sound

The Chevrolet Volt's strongest point? It's a normal car when you need it to be. You can just get in and drive it pretty much like any other car.

It's obviously way more than that, though.

As a long-time Prius owner, the feel of the butter-smooth transmission felt quite normal to me. The
electric launch can feel strangely slow because it is silent and very progressively smooth. Punch a gas engine and it downshifts and roars. Punch the Volt and it just goes fast very quickly without the usual revving and shifting of gears.

I was a little disappointed by the range on my first drive up the Don Valley Parkway from the Star at One Yonge St. I only got up to the Bloomington Sideroad before the gas generator started making power.

The transition was so smooth that had I not been watching the range indicator as it ran down, I would not have even known it had happened. 41.9 km seems like a poor result. I was basically going uphill the entire way and let's just say I wasn't going slow.

On the way back from Parry Sound, I drove a little more sedately and got around 60-70km on that charge.

The exact distance was confusing because I ran a quick 10 km shopping trip in the morning on the full charge and plugged it back in for awhile. The computer added the distances together in the  range screen, treating it as the same charge (the second short charge never got it back to full).

Bottom line is, you can get more if you try to.

Basically I loved the car. I would have no problem driving it every day and I never really got into the
computer functions built into the screens. They were intuitive enough that I managed to do all the stuff I needed to — set the radio, find and turn off the electric seat heaters — without getting lost in endless menus.

Now, if they could only sell it for under 29k, I might buy one.
 
David Cooper, Chief
Photographer, Toronto Star

Volt a letdown for lead foot

Drivers with a lead foot will feel let down by the Chevy Volt.

I did.

Some might say I’m annoyingly aggressive behind a wheel.

On Queen Street, whenever possible (read: safe), I will try to beat a streetcar through the intersection.

Not in this car.

I couldn’t get a head start against a Chrysler Fifth Avenue when a red light turned green on the Bayview Extension.

It was almost as frustrating to stop as it was to speed up. There was a crunchiness to the braking; like it slowed in phases, not on my foot’s command.

I liked some things about the Volt.

The headroom. I’m 5”10 and didn’t feel a bit cramped. The quiet. If it weren’t for the electronic dash
display, I wouldn’t know the car was on. Actually made me feel a little more Zen than I do in my SUV.

If I wasn’t running late for an appointment, I might have laid back and enjoyed the drive.

— Diana Zlomislic

The only difference? There was no noise

I was charged (if you’ll pardon the pun) with driving the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt electric cars on loan to the Star over to the Direct Energy Centre last weekend for the Green Living Show.

I drove both cars – the Volt over and the Leaf back. I felt a sense of security in the Volt because I knew there was gas to fall back on.

Both cars were very easy to drive but they were disconcerting because you don’t hear anything. Also, pedestrians don’t hear you coming so the first thing I asked was where the horn was. Otherwise they drive like a normal car.

I purposely slammed on the brakes in both to see how they felt and they felt fine.

At the Green Living Show on Friday afternoon, I plugged the Leaf into a 110-volt plug, thinking it would be charged up that night. Then I read the manual and found that it would take 21 hours to charge (on a 110-volt charge) and so had to go back Saturday night to unplug it and found it was fully charged.

For city driving, manoeuvreability of both cars is great. The Volt has great space; the Leaf is a little tighter, particularly if there are people in the back seat.

Both cars had great pickup and no way was I not keeping up with the flow of traffic. As I said, they were like normal cars except there was no noise.

— Cathy King

 

I couldn't tell if the car was on or off

As one of two Toronto Star employees assigned to take the Project Green electric cars to the Green Living Show last weekend, I drove the Nissan Leaf.

As I had never driven an electric car before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Right off, it felt a bit strange because it was so quiet. It was hard to tell if it was on or off.

I’m used to driving my own cars when they are very low on fuel and so I know what to expect and how far I can drive, even with the gas light on. But I was a bit unsure with the Leaf, as the videographers had been driving it around for much of the day last Friday. I didn’t know how far I would be able to go with the battery partially drained, even though the car was telling me that I would be fine.

When I arrived at the Green Living Show, in the Direct Energy Centre building at the CNE, we had to jockey the cars in and around the Star booth in order to fit them in. So I had to get in and out of the car to make sure it was positioned correctly and I was able to do all that with ease.

After I left the Direct Energy Centre, I got thinking about the car and the fact that I didn’t have to use the key to start it; I just had to push a button and it turned on. I also thought again about how quiet the car was and that it was hard to tell if the car was on or off.

Suddenly I thought: did I turn the car off? What would happen if I didn’t? Would the battery run out? If I walked away from the car with the key fob in my pocket, would it just turn off automatically? I didn’t know.

So I went back – and guess what? The car was off.

– Brian Cordingley