The Nissan Leaf has gotten big headlines since its announcement in early August, and for good reason. This is the first real, mass-market electric car to be sold in the United States. It is a full-size car able to hold five passengers, and you will be able to recharge it in your garage.

General Motors did offer the EV1 electric car starting in 1998, but only about 1,000 of these two-seaters were released. Then GM canceled the program and destroyed all the cars in 2003.

So the Leaf is the start of a new era. And many experts have high hopes, because the Leaf is a real car. First, it offers 100 miles of travel per charge — plenty of range for typical day-to-day use in America. Second, it has plenty of power. A 107 horsepower electric motor gives it brisk acceleration and a top speed of 90 mph. Third, you can recharge it overnight in your garage, or you can go to a quick-charge station where you can recharge it in 30 minutes or less. Fourth, it is a reasonably priced car that will be very inexpensive to operate. Recharging the car for its next 100-mile journey should cost less than one gallon of gasoline. And finally it is a very green car. It produces no emissions at all while you are driving it, needs no motor oil or anti-freeze and could significantly improve urban air quality if enough people buy one.

You might have a question at this point. If the Leaf has all of these advantages and looks so promising, why has it taken so long for a car company to produce a real electric car? It's because electric cars are not quite as easy as they look. We play with little toy electric cars starting at age 2 or 3, so electric cars seem trivial. In a toy car there's a small electric motor and four AA batteries. But a real electric car is far more complicated.

The biggest hurdle has been the battery pack. In particular it has been the size, the cost, the range, the lifespan and the safety of the battery pack that has been the problem. For example, if you tried to create the Nissan Leaf with lead-acid batteries — the technology used by the big battery in your car now — the Leaf would be impossible. The battery pack would need 40 or 50 of the big batteries and they would weigh something close to a ton. They would only last a few years and replacement batteries would cost something like $5,000. The Leaf would be impossible to create with this technology. Nickel metal hydride batteries are smaller and lighter, but they are still problematic.

So Nissan (in conjunction with NEC) has developed a new type of lithium ion battery for the Leaf. The lithium-ion approach is the same technology powering your laptop computer. By comparison to lead-acid and NiMH batteries, lithium-ion batteries are small and light. But up until now they have been extremely expensive and prone to the occasional explosion. Nissan is using a new packaging technology that looks like an oversized sardine can, and apparently has been able to bring the cost down through economies of scale and innovative leasing arrangements. Making the batteries safe enough to survive an accident and rugged enough to handle sweltering summer days, freezing winter nights and significant amounts of vibration has also been a challenge that Nissan, apparently, has overcome.

With the battery problem solved, Nissan then had to solve many smaller problems. For example, in a traditional car the air conditioner, heater, power steering pump and power brakes all take their power from the engine. In the Leaf, the AC and power steering pumps need their own electric motors, and the heat is generated with a heat pump instead of coming for free from excess engine heat.

And then there is recharging. The Leaf has a 24 kilowatt-hour battery pack. If you plug the Leaf into a standard house outlet in the U.S., a full charge would take about 16 hours. Using something like the plug for an electric dryer would reduce the time to perhaps four hours. But what if you need to recharge fast? Nissan has developed a quick charge station that can do the job in 30 minutes or less. That's longer than it takes to fill a gas tank, but within the realm of reality. If these recharging stations were to spread to normal gas stations and convenience stores, it would make electric cars nearly as convenient as gasoline models. And there is no way to refuel a gasoline car overnight in the garage.

Taken all together, the Leaf's features have the potential to open a whole new segment in the automotive world. It will be interesting to see how other manufacturers respond.

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