MAN TAKES HIS 10-YEAR-OLD NISSAN LEAF EV TO SEE IF IT CAN WIN AN EFFICIENCY RALLY AND HE'S LEFT SURPRISED
This UK YouTuber is still driving a 10-year-old Nissan Leaf – the OG of electric cars – almost daily.
There are a few things worth addressing if we’re talking about old electric cars.
The car is still running well, and it’s still a great daily driver.
But when the YouTuber decided to take part in an efficiency rally, it became a sort of ‘lie detector’ for the aging EV.
Efficiency rallies are very different from your regular car rally
EVs don’t consume energy in the same way that internal combustion vehicles burn fuel.
In general, most cars are either inherently efficient or they aren’t.
A Fiat 500 with the old 1.2-liter engine gives good MPG, even if you drive it like you’re Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone.
By contrast, a V8 G-Wagen has terrible MPG, no matter how you drive it.
Electric cars don’t work like that.
On paper, the 318-mile range of a Cybertruck can easily be reduced to 200 or even 150 miles if you drive it too fast for too long.
That’s why efficiency rallies are becoming a thing, because people want to get as many miles out of a charge as possible.
It’s not for everyone, but it can be interesting, and it’s definitely challenging.
Also, as a note of color, Top Gear actually pioneered this 20 years ago, when they ‘raced’ three fuel efficient cars from Basel, Switzerland to Blackpool, UK to see if they could get there on a single tank.
How did the 10-year-old Nissan Leaf fare?
There are two issues with a 10-year-old EV.
The first problem is that the battery will have lost a significant degree of efficiency.
The second problem is that even when it was new, a battery from 10 years ago was a lot less efficient than one built yesterday.
So when UK YouTuber Efficient Alex entered the London to Brighton Efficiency Rally, he was expecting to lose by miles.
By using a combination of old tricks (no air con for the entire trip) and some new ones (he drove with his shoes off for better pedal sensitivity), Alex managed an impressive 5.55 miles per kilowatt hour, which tells us two things.
It’s certainly an impressive result for a 10-year-old Nissan Leaf, but maybe not in absolute terms.
The winner, a Kia EV4, achieved 6.9 miles per kilowatt hour, and a gap of nearly 1.5 miles per kWh shows that you can’t really argue with a decade of manufacturer innovation.
