The Nissan Leaf - on the 2011 Car of the Year shortlist
The yet-to-be-released Nissan LEAF bizarrely makes the shortlist for the 2011 Car of the Year
Has the world gone completely barking mad? Why on earth would the Car of the Year panel include a yet-to-be-released electric car – The Nissan LEAF – which is inferior in every way to all the other cars on the 2011 Car of the Year shortlist, except that it costs less to run simply because it is fuelled by an as yet untaxed fuel – electricity?
Its range is massively poorer than any of the other cars, it is disproportionately expensive for what’s on offer and you could convincingly argue that it is more polluting than many other comparable cars. After all, surely it’s more efficient to use fossil fuels to run an ICE than it is to create electricity from fossil fuels to then run an electric car?
Electric cars are a sop to the idiocy that is man-mad climate change. They are suitable only for eco-mentalists with a green halo to polish, or as short-range runarounds in congested urban areas where they succeed in shifting the pollution out of the urban area to wherever the electricity was generated.
Rant over, what about the other cars on the list? Citroen gets a nod for the C3 and DS3 (we reckon the DS3 is possibly the best car of the last year); Vauxhall/Opel for the Meriva (a clever MPV); Dacia for the Duster (great value); Alfa Romeo for the Giulietta (a very stylish Focus competitor); Volvo for the S60/V60 (probably the best Volvo in a generation) and Ford for the C-Max, which is the first Ford to utilise the underpinnings of the 2011 Focus.
Every one of these cars is exceptional in one way or another, except the LEAF which is exceptional only for its pointless, inefficient and inconvenient powerplant.
We’d vote for the Citroen DS3.
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