Nissans New Leaf Is An Old Idea Tried Again

Nissan has announced the development of its new electric car which is called the Nissan Leaf. It is scheduled to come into production in the second half of 2010 in US and then move into the Japanese market. There is a great deal of publicity surrounding what is being offered as a new idea.

The car has a range of 100 miles ( 160 kms) before you need to recharge the battery and its top speed is 90 miles (145 kms per hour) per hour. Nissan claim that these specifications are enough to satisfy the needs of 80% of drivers, so they clearly haven't taken into account the needs of those living in rural America, who need to commute hundreds of miles just to get to work, or the nearest supermarket.

This is being presented as a fantastic, new idea and there is lots of hype around the idea of zero emission motoring, but the idea is almost 150 years old. The possible speed of an electrical vehicle has increased but there is still the need to keep recharging the battery.

The invention of the storage battery by Frenchman, Gaston Plante in 1859, made the electric car a possibility. The battery was further improved by Camille Faure twenty years later and he built what is thought to be the world's first electric vehicle. It was a tricycle and it first ran in Paris in 1881.

Other three-wheelers followed in London in 1882 and then in Boston six years later. The first US battery powered automobiles were built in Des Moines, Iowa in 1890 and they could reach a speed of 23 kms per hour.

In the 1900's, 38% of the automobiles in US were were powered by electricity. (The rest were powered by steam and gasoline.)

It was the development of the electric-starter that finally saw the end of the electric car. It meant that cars no longer had to be hand cranked to get them started, so gasoline powered vehicles became more popular.

When someone comes up with a way of constantly recharging the car battery via a continuously operating dynamo, then we will really have something worth buying. Imagine the rush to buy cars that didn't need to be fuelled up.