Follow the timing on one LEAF
On January 11, 2011 we received the following note from Nissan via e-mail:
As your Nissan LEAF™ is being built and shipped, we will continue to update your vehicle’s status. So make sure to sign in to “my account” to stay current with your estimated delivery date.
We then jumped onto the Nissan LEAF corporate web site and found that we still had the “edit” link next to the color selection of our LEAF order, so we knew that our car was not in production yet. In December we posted this article, which provides our thoughts on why the existence, or non-existence, of this “edit” link is important. In a nutshell – if you can change the color of your car, it ain’t built yet. And since color can be changed up until the last minute, once you can no longer change color, your car will be built very soon.
For the next several days, we went to the web site, checked for the existence of the link, and still found the link there, to our great disappointment. We got busy and hadn’t been back for a few days. You’ve heard the old saw “A watched pot never boils”? Apparently it applies to “edit” links also. As soon as we stopped checking for it, it went away. So we feel that if our LEAF is not already built, it will be built in the next couple of days.
We are not really sure when the link went away, but it was sometime in the last four or five days. Our prognostication is that our LEAF will be here in about eight weeks. This is not mere speculation, but based on an existing truth: The first production LEAF in the world rolled off of the Oppama, Japan assembly line on October 22, 2010. The first production LEAF delivery in the world was seven weeks later in Northern California on December 11, 2010. Eight weeks (for our LEAF) puts us roughly into the second week of March, comfortably within Nissan’s “Month of March” timeframe.
We have been accepted as participants in the EV Project. The EV Project will provide us with a Level 2 charging dock in exchange for our charging data, which they will compile with other information to determine how users are charging their EVs. We have heard that it is typical for ECOtality, the company behind this project, to notify participants about three weeks prior to vehicle delivery to arrange installation of the charging dock. Certainly, we will pass along when we get this notification. Curiously, ECOtality has never performed a site survey for said installation. Now that we have a delivery month, perhaps we will contact ECOtality just to make sure there are no surprises.
If you have an interest in following the real-world delivery process – stay tuned. We will update with Nissan’s official word as our delivery date approaches.
(P.S.: Our LEAF is (or will be) Cayenne Red. And we live in San Diego. Perhaps after the arrival of our car, we will try to duplicate the photo above (from the Nissan press site) as closely as possible. Sharp eyed San Diegans would have noticed the blue SD pennant on the light pole.)
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