THIS road test was barely an hour old when I realised Nissan’s marketing spiel had overlooked one of the driving modes you can enjoy when at the wheel of the new all-electric Leaf.
There is plenty of literature out there about the D and B driver settings, not to mention the e-Pedal.
Yet when I stopped on a petrol station forecourt – not for fuel, but snacks – I realised I had discovered another mode to go with D, B and e-Pedal: smug mode.
Driving past the sorry saps at the petrol pumps – all of whom appeared to be stuck in a prehistoric, expensive world of fossil-fuel dependency – it felt as though, in the Leaf, I was giving them a vision of the future.
As I nonchalantly rolled the clean, green Leaf towards a pump-less parking space, their eyes enviously followed it across the forecourt.
The fact is that the Leaf is a breath of fresh air in today’s increasingly polluted world. Flatulent birds give off more in the way of emissions.
And the Leaf is as light on your wallet as it is on the environment when it comes to running costs, by dint of it having fewer moving parts compared to conventional, gas- guzzling equivalents. Buy a Leaf and you won’t need to bother with things like oil, spark plugs and radiators, either.
That is no different to the original incarnation of the car, of course, which was one of the stars of the 2011 documentary film, Revenge of the Electric Car.
Yet the new model makes the old one look less a film star, more ‘a leafless ordinary’. Granted, that isn’t difficult given the original car appeared to have all the aerodynamic aesthetics of a leaf, but the new model’s bodywork is stylishly contoured and the front-mounted electric drivetrain produces 110 KW (the equivalent of 148 bhp).
That’s a significant improvement on the old model and means the new Leaf is far more sprightly.
The strangest thing to get used to when driving the Leaf is the noise – or total lack of it. You could start it up in the middle of a deer park and not one stag would raise an antler.
Incidentally, there is no ignition slot for the key fob, which you simply store in a cubby hole between the driver and front passenger seats. Instead, the car is started by simultaneously pressing the power-on switch while pushing down on the brake pedal.
Once in motion, the only sound you hear is that of tyres on Tarmac. There is potentially a downside to such a quiet ride – pedestrians don’t always hear the car coming. But in Jersey, where the speed limit is 30 mph in most areas and 40 mph tops, it is never a problem, as long as you keep your wits about you.
