Nissan LEAF £2500 UK price drop

Nissan has revealed that the LEAF EV will be reduced in price by £2500 with immediate effect and ahead of the launch of the uprated 2013 LEAF.

The world hasn’t exactly fallen in love with electric cars, which has as much to do with the fact that an electric car, with its limited range, is never going to be a replacement for a normal ICE car.

But compounding the impracticality of the EV as a replacement for the ICE car is the very high prices car makers are charging for electric cars, the sort of prices that mean buyers will probably find the ‘Cheap to Fuel’ EV a more costly option than fuelling a much cheaper comparable iICE car with petrol or diesel.

Unless battery technology takes a quantum leap forward in the very short term – with batteries at a fraction of the cost of current batteries, much reduced in size and fully rechargeable in just a few minutes – the EV will never replace the ICE car as transport of choice for the vast majority.

So there’s not much car makers can do about battery technology and cost, but they can bite the bullet and reduce the retail price of their EV offerings. Which is exactly what Nissan are doing with the LEAF.

The price of the Nissan LEAF EV is being cut by £2,500 in the UK, cutting the price of the LEAF to £23,490 (after the £5000 taxpayer bribe to buy an EV), and in addition Nissan are offering a deal at just £249 a month for a new LEAF.

It’s a step in the right direction for the LEAF, and may even persuade a few ‘should I, shouldn’t I’ buyers to jump in to the LEAF.

But we can’t see it making a huge difference to sales.