June auto sales are out. Nissan’s electric car had a good month compared to GM’s not-really-an-electric-car, theVolt.
Sales of the Nissan LEAF 100-percent electric vehicle reached a new high, with 1,708 units delivered in June, for a total of 3,875 deliveries in 2011.
The Chevy Volt sold 561 units in June(PDF). All in all, Nissan is winning handily in the battle for hippie hearts and minds. The chart below shows that since April, Nissan has overtaken the Volt and kept on going. The good news for the Volt is that the Leaf will be all out of charge 40 miles down the road, so there is still a chance it can catch up.
To put the numbers in some perspective, Nissan stated it’s goal to sell 500,000 electric vehicles per month by 2013. That’s 18 months away, and looks unlikely to happen. It might be better for Gaia if it didn’t, since EV’s aren’t especially green:
An electric car owner would have to drive at least 129,000km before producing a net saving in CO2. Many electric cars will not travel that far in their lifetime because they typically have a range of less than 145km on a single charge and are unsuitable for long trips. Even those driven 160,000km would save only about a tonne of CO2 over their lifetimes.
Good news for Japanese Leaf owners is that they can now call for help when their electric pride and joy runs out of juice at the end of the driveway:
In a test program in its home prefecture south of Tokyo, Nissan’s 5-ton “EV rescue vehicle,” with a 29-kilowatt diesel-slurping mobile generator, speeds to the aid of EV drivers with dead batteries.
A 5-ton diesel generator truck? How green is the Leaf now?
You couldn’t make it up.
Enough about EVs. Leaf me alone!
Not to put too much of a damper on it, we might want to wait before declaring it dead, though: http://www.mtfca.com/encyclo/fdsales.htm
We’re going to need a lot more coal-fired power plants.