What's the news?
You know that whole thing about electric cars and range anxiety? That nagging doubt that you're just not going to be able to get to work/home/the ACDC concert in your electric car because it doesn't have enough range? Well, Nissan is attempting to dissipate that worry by pointing out that owners of its Leaf electric car are doing more miles, 50 per cent more in fact, than drivers of conventional diesel or petrol cars.
According to Nissan's data, the average annual mileage across France, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Italy and the UK is 10,818km. Now, every Leaf has Nissan's CarWings telemetry system fitted and this allows Nissan to keep an eye on what sort of distances its cars are covering and how they are being charged. According to the figures from CarWings, 89 per cent of its 31,000 European Leaf owners are charging up at home overnight (which Nissan claims they can do for less than €3 per 160km charge, depending on the electricity provider and tariff) and are covering a whopping 16,624km per year - half as much again as the European average.
Jean-Pierre Diernaz, Director of Electric Vehicles for Nissan in Europe, said: "Since the beginning we have said that the Nissan LEAF is much more than just a city car or second car and now we can show the data that proves this. Our customers frequently tell us that they buy the Nissan LEAF as a second car, but end up using it far more than their other vehicle and the information we receive from CarWings reinforces that message."
"The customers tell us this is because the car has very low fuel and servicing costs and that along with the smooth, almost silent ride of the Nissan LEAF make it difficult to go back to a diesel or petrol car."
Anything else?
There is a small flaw in the figures though. Nissan is working out its average Leaf mileage by taking the figures from seven territories - Germany as well as the six mentioned above, but has taken the average petrol and diesel mileages without including Germany.
Nissan says "a German statistic was not used in the European average as the raw data is not available and all average kilometre figures quoted are estimates."
However, we've been able to find an estimate for average German annual mileage of 14,000km from a survey carried out by Shell Fuels. Include that figure into the data and you get an average petrol and diesel mileage of 11,272km. That's still significantly less than the total 16,588km claimed by Nissan for Leafs though.