Where have all the EVs gone ?

Electric vehicles are all the rage with eco-conscious customers, and new models are being announced every day, it seems.

But where are all EVs on kiwi roads? Are they:

• Too expensive
• Too limited in range
• Have no nation-wide charging facilities
• All of the above and more, say critics of the revolutionary vehicles.

Now, just as imports of used Nissan Leafs were starting to climb in NZ, the price in Japan for secondhand Leafs has gone through the roof and customers have have stopped buying.

We were selling 2-3 Nissan Leafs a week, but now the prices in Japan have gone beserk and we’ll be running out of stock in a month-and-a-half, says Henry Schmidt of Auckland’s Autolink Cars.

Another market has opened up in the world – possibly Sri Lanka – and they’re buying every Leafs they can get their hands on in Japan. It’s pushed prices up by a million yen – way over the top.

We just hope that it’s a short term problem and the market will return to normal when the new people stop buying.

We’ve seen it all before when a model becomes flavour of the month – but it all comes to an end, sooner or later.

Schmidt says that it would help the take up of electric cars here if Nissan NZ imported the Generation 2 Leaf. It’s ironic that you can get the newer model here as a used import, but you can’t buy it new in either Australia or New Zealand.

John Manley, MD of Nissan NZ, says that as the manufacturer of the LEAF, the best-selling electric vehicle in history, Nissan has the objective of remaining the global leader in zero emissions motoring – and this objective is fully supported by Nissan New Zealand.

As with every future vehicle model we add to our local catalogue, we are currently in discussions with Nissan’s global head office about our plans for the LEAF in this market.

Among the topics being discussed are the need for government support to encourage New Zealanders to buy electric cars and the challenge privately imported second-hand grey-market models pose to maximizing official sales of the LEAF here.

The arguments for EV’s here are strong as more than 80% of NZ’s electricity is generated from renewable resources – so we don’t need to replace one kind of pollution (diesel or petrol powered cars) with another (electricity generated by burning oil or coal).