We say with tongue firmly planted in cheek
It’s all in the spin… as they say.
December 2010 saw 19 LEAF sales, according to Nissan’s national sales numbers. January 2011 saw 87 sales. Very low numbers by anyone’s standards though the month-to-month percentage change above is correct.
Chevrolet Volt on the other hand, delivered 326 units in December 2010 and 321 in January 2011.
Is the above headline accurate? Yes. Does it tell the whole story? Not even close. Both of these vehicles will be sold for many years to come (hopefully), and there is much of the story yet to be told. But this is how it stands at the moment:
Two month totals – Chevrolet: 647, Nissan: 106.
It doesn’t matter how these numbers are presented, the fact of the matter is that there are more Chevrolet Volts in the hands of the customer than Nissan LEAFs. Currently. Also, both numbers are extremely low by each manufacturer’s typical standards.
There will be much written about the battle between Chevrolet and Nissan in the years to come. Others will join the battle over time, but certainly in the United States today, the major players are two. And they are attacking the problem in dramatically different ways, which is what makes watching the struggle so interesting.
And it is a struggle – absolutely – for both parties, along with all of their constituent parties, including us consumers. What is more important, range or efficiency? Should we do what is best for humankind, or are my immediate needs my concern? We all have different reasons for making the decisions that we do. We here at Living LEAF do not purport to know what the outcome will be. We watch, with interest, as many of our readers do.
As an aside, we are currently reading “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Subtitled “The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE” perhaps you get a better sense of what the book is about. Early in the book Mr. Taleb makes an interesting claim -”History does not crawl, it jumps”. If one looks at the history of the automobile, once the automobile propulsion system was firmly established in the 1920′s, it has crawled forward to its current position. (Prior to that many methods were contemplated – steam, electricity, and the internal combustion engine.) Approaching 100 years later, we could be looking at a jumping point. The hybrid allowed the automobile to crawl faster. The electric vehicle (EV) could allow a jump in technology that changes what an automobile means to society. With many poised to embrace the technology – perhaps not to the same scale that Nissan has committed to, but to embrace it nonetheless – one must consider whether we have truly reached a jumping point.