By combing their facts and figures, the Renault-Nissan Alliance has set many production and sales records in recent years. The latest is quite an important one, as it deals with zero-emission electric vehicles, and buys the Alliance lots of bragging rights. They just delivered their 100,000th electric car.
The milestone car is a Nissan LEAF, which accounts for a big chunk of that 100K sales, bought by American graduate student Allison Howard from Giorgia. Allison is quite happy with her LEAF, commenting: “It’s so cool. I love it. The fact that it’s all electric and I don’t have to spend money on gas as a college student, that’s great.”
Of course, she didn’t take into account the price difference between this car and a normal hatchback, and she ignored the issue of the limited range and agonizingly long charging time. That’ll come to her the first time she tries to go, say, 100 miles away from home.
Despite its drawbacks, the LEAF is the world’s best-selling EV with over 71,000 units sold worldwide since its introduction three years ago. Even though Renault has a wider range of electric cars – including Kangoo Z.E., Renault also offers Fluence Z.E. sedan; the two-seat commuter vehicle Twizy; and the subcompact ZOE – their share of the record is less than 30,000 units.
What is prticularly interesting is the fact that they sat down at Renault-Nissan HQ and actually calculated how many miles those 100k electric cars have covered so far! They’ve done approximately 841 million zero-emission kilometers — enough to circle the earth more than 20,000 times. In doing so they have saved 53 million liters of oil and 124 million kg of C02. We wish they would also calculate how many hours of their owners’ lives they’ve wasted being plugged-in.