Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi Marshall Brain with today's question, why is the Nissan Leaf car that was announced this weekend such a big deal. It's true that the Nissan Leaf has gotten big headline since its announcement this weekend, but it's for good reason. This is the first real mass market electric car to be sold in the United States. It's a full size car, able to hold five passengers, and you'll be able to recharge it in your garage.
General Motors did offer the e V one electric cars starting in but only about a thousand of those two seaters were built. Then GM canceled the program and destroyed all the cars in two thousand three. So the Leaf really is the start of a new era, and many experts have high hopes because the Leaf is a real car. First, it offers a hundred miles of travel per charge, plenty of range for typical day to day use in America. Second,
it has plenty of power. A hundred and seven horsepower electric motor gives it brisk acceleration and a top speed of ninety miles per hour. Third, you can recharge it overnight in your garage, or you can go to a quick charge station where you can recharge it in just thirty minutes or less. Fourth, it's a reasonably priced car that will be very inexpensive to operate. Recharging the Leaf for the next hundred mile journey should cost less than
one gallon of gasoline. And finally, it's a very green car. It produces no emissions at all while you're driving, it needs no motor oil or anti freeze, and it could significantly improve urban air quality if enough people buy them. You might have a question at this point. If the Leaf has all of these advantages and looks so promising, why is it taken so long for a car company to produce a real electric car. It's because electric cars
are not quite as simple as they look. I mean, we play with little toy electric cars starting at age two or three, so electric cars seem trivial. In a toy car, there's a small electric motor and four double A batteries, but a real electric car is far more complicated. The biggest hurdle has been the battery pack. In particular, it's been the size, the cost, the range, the lifespan, and the safety of the battery pack that has been
the problem. For example, if you tried to create the Nissan Leaf with lead acid batteries, the technology used by the big battery in your car now, the leaf would be impossible. The battery pack would need forty or fifty of those big batteries and they would weigh something close to a ton, They would only last a few years, and replacement batteries would cost something like five thousand dollars.
The leaf would be impossible in this configuration. Nickel metal hydride batteries are smaller and lighter, but they're still problematic. So Nissan, in conjunction with Neck, has developed a new type of lithium ion battery for the leaf. This is the same technology powering your laptop computer. By comparison to lead acid and nickel metal hydride batteries, lithium ion batteries are small and light, but up until now they've been
extremely expensive and prone to the occasional explosion. Nissan is using a new packaging technology that looks like an oversized sardine can, and apparently has been able to bring the cost down through economies of scale and innovative leasing arrangements, making the batteries safe enough to survive an accident and rugged enough to handle sweltering summer days, freezing winter nights, and all kinds of vibration has also been a challenge
that Nissan apparently has overcome. With the battery problem solved, Nissan then had to solve many smaller problems. For example, in a traditional car, the air conditioner, the heat or the power stirring pump, the power brakes all take their power from the engine. In the leaf, the air conditioning and the power steering pumps need their own electric motors, and the heat is generated electrically instead of coming for
free from excess engine heat. There's actually a little heat pump made out of the air conditioner to provide heat to the car. And then there's the recharging problem. The leaf has a four kilowatt hour battery pack. If you plug the leaf into a standard house outlet in the US, a full charge would take something like sixteen hours. Using something like the plug for an electric dryer would reduce the time to perhaps four hours. But what if you
need to recharge fast? Nissan has developed a quick charge station that can do the job in thirty minutes or less. That's longer than it takes to fill a gas tank, but within the realm of reality. If these recharging stations were to spread normal gas stations and convenience stores, it wouldn't make electric cars nearly as convenient as gasoline model, and there is no way to refuel a gasoline car
overnight in your garage. Taken altogether, the Leaf's features have the potential to open a whole new segment in the automotive world. It'll be interesting to see how other manufacturers respond. For more on this and thousands of other topics because at how stuff Works dot com,