LEAF or Volt

Autobloggreen is asking visitors to vote in a poll, LEAF, Volt or neither?

While I like autobloggreen’s content (hence it’s inclusion in my RSS new reader gizmo as one of the 6,983 sites I monitor), but I think this is a ridiculous poll. The LEAF (a 100-mile/charge battery EV, which Nissan is promising to sell in Japan and the US next year for well under $20,000), and the Volt, which I’m sure readers of this site are very familiar with[1], are so different, it’s like asking people to choose between a sports car and a pickup truck: Which one you choose will be largely, but not entirely, determined by your needs.

In the US, the LEAF will be incredibly popular with multi-car households that have at least one garage slot with a nearby outlet. If I needed a replacement for Space Wart, my 2003 Scion xA, I would buy a LEAF faster than you can say, “fill it up with 110 volts”. For the price of a mid-range Corolla or Civic, a consumer would get a complete divorce from worries about the price of oil and gasoline, as well as much less in the way of ongoing maintenance and repair costs. The 100-mile battery range sounds extremely limiting, but only until the average American is asked: How many days in the last year did you drive more than 80 miles in a single day? I’ve found that as soon as you ask a lot of people that question, the next thing they want to know is when the car will be available and the price. The potential market for the LEAF and similar EVs in the US alone is easily in the millions.

To be blunt, I’m not sure who will buy the Volt, aside from the usual bleeding-edge early adopter with $40,000 burning a hole in his or her pocket. (And it doesn’t help that the Volt will be on the market months after the LEAF, which means it will face a lot of consumers asking why it costs so much.) For the price of a Volt, people could buy a LEAF and something like a Civic hybrid. Ouch.

Bonus prediction (as a reward for reading to the end of this post): GM is supposedly announcing Something Big tomorrow, after engaging in one of those mystery marketing campaigns we all hate. The big detail from the ads seems to be the number “230″. My prediction is that the 230 will turn out to be the effective miles per gallon of the Volt, taking into account the 40-mile battery range and the “average American’s driving pattern”. If that’s the plan, they’re just opening themselves up for more criticism (although the number feels about right). Instead of doubling down on the 40-mile battery range, they need to cut it to something like 20 miles (possibly in a sub-model) so they can drop the entry price.

[1] For those not familiar: The Volt will be a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) with an on-board engine that will recharge the batteries, as needed. The engine does not directly drive the wheels. This sounds like a ridiculous, Rube Goldberg approach, but it actually makes a lot of sense. The Volt has long been promised to deliver 40 miles/charge running as an EV. Add the on-board engine, and you have a cruising range at least comparable to that of a current, reasonably efficient internal combustion engine vehicle.

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