By Bill Nye | Published: August 15, 2010 – 7:43 pm

I recently had a chance to drive a prototype of the Nissan Leaf. I reported about this briefly on my Facebook page. Since then, so many people have asked me about it, I decided to put something here on the home page.

Right now, I hope it will be my next car. For a small car, it’s quite spacious. This may surprise you. In general, electric drive trains are much more compact than ICE systems. Nissan spread the batteries out low in the unibody; all this leaves more room for you and me.

The Leaf is an all-electric car– no gas cap (no place to put gas). It’s got batteries instead. Keep in mind that electric cars cost much less per mile than gas powered ones. Electricity can be sent right to your house. There’s no need for tanker trucks plying our roads on the way to gas (petrol) stations. Electric motors are well over 90% efficient. An Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is a heat engine. It depends on how hot the gas can burn and how cool it is outside the engine. They can get to around 30%– that’s it.

Electric cars are also very much quieter than cars most of us are used to. When you drive one, it’s magical.

To my eye and to the eyes of other people I test drove and rode with, it has the best instrument panel– what your car-people call the best “driver interface,” of any electric vehicle I’ve seen or driven. It’s easy to figure out. Your speed is presented on a heads-up display at the base of the windshield, visible even in bright sunlight.

It has marvelous features in its navigation system: O yes, it shows you where you are on a good-looking map. But, it also displays a circle on the map, like a target with you at the bull’s eye, indicating your range– how far you can drive from where you are right now given how much charge is left in your battery pack– very cool. When one is new to electric vehicle driving, it’s easy to get what they call “range anxiety.” You worry about your range– about whether or not you’ll be able to get home. After you’re used to running all your errands and completing your commute with plenty of charge in your pack (your battery pack), you don’t much notice the range. Once in while though, it’s important. It’s beautifully displayed and very clear how far you can keep going.

It has five seats. Really, five people can sit inside. My recently returned Mini E (Electric Mini Cooper) that I was able to drive for a year had no such feature: two seats, and just barely those. The trunk could hold a manila folder or so. And the battery cooling system of the Mini E, is like, so totally, 20^th Century. The cooling air flows right through the cockpit. Put a bag behind the passenger seat, the batteries overheat, and your car just stops. Not so with the Leaf. Its cooling system has been much more thought through. It’s a real production car. Oh, and the Leaf has a pretty good trunk (boot) for a small vehicle.

I can face it, though. The Leaf is just not as sporty as the Mini E but it’s sporty enough for me. By sporty, I mean the Mini E goes like a bat out of someplace dark and hot… fast. The Leaf is not quite like that, but it’s close enough for me.

This is the future, my friends. An electric car that is built so that it feels very much like a car– like a gas-powered ICE-style car that you might be used to. I hope to get one before 2011 gets underway. I’ll use it for almost all of my driving, and in Los Angeles, one can do a great deal of driving. Where I live it’s often no fun, and it’s only as safe as cars are. That’s about a 100,000^th as safe as flying. All things considered though, I drive. I do my best to enjoy it. I’m looking forward to the near silence of an all-electric machine. My commute will get quieter, cheaper, and just more fun.

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