Monday, December 19, 2011

Changes for a Better EV Life: Slowest EV Charge Time: LEAF

Having driven CO2 Fre for over a month now, I feel I can now safely make some recommendations for change that would make my life infinitely easier.  Some of these things I've been writing about long before I purchased my Nissan LEAF; I knew going in some sacrifice would be required for the greater good.  That's not to say there aren't great things like the burgeoning Charging Infrastructure and wonderful LEAF features to help get me through the day!  But there's always room for improvement and if you don't speak up, nothing will get done.

Putting the LEAF Charger in Perspective

The chart above demonstrates how of the most popular EVs today, the LEAF takes the longest to charge from depleted to full:

As can be seen, the LEAF is slower by an hour even over the Tesla Model S and is clearly the slowest to charge of all; it's even twice as slow as the Focus Electric and Chevy Volt.  Of course, in terms of the amount of mileage you get from charging any of these cars can differ greatly so to be fair, compare them to the total pack size:

Obviously, the Model S has a lot more battery than the Nissan LEAF but still only takes about 6½ hours to charge.  And since most cars in the sample range in capacity from about 16 kWh to the LEAF's 24 kWh, yet most of these have much shorter charge times, it's clear that Nissan underestimated the competition.

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