LEAF sales in the U.S. are ramping up
LEAF sales climb while Volt’s languish
Nissan LEAF sales got off to an extremely slow start this year. Due to the all-new nature of the LEAF – both technology and platform – Nissan wanted to take their time ramping up production. This way when the vehicles were produced in volume, they were produced with quality. The scale in the above chart certainly reflects the availability of the LEAF improving over the first six months of this year.
A look at the Chevrolet Volt sales shows a different picture.
Throwing out the first two months of the year for both makers, Volt is bouncing around 500 units per month while LEAF has shown consistent sales growth with over triple the sales in June over the Chevy. We are not even going to try to get into the why for now. Perhaps we’ll attempt that in another article. But we did think that a six-month comparison might be in order, so we offer the two graphs of the accomplishments to date of these two makers.
It should be pointed out that the LEAF electric car is a true world car whereas the Volt hybrid is U.S. only. U.S. sales of the LEAF were slowed early in the year simply because Nissan were using all of their LEAF production capacity to fulfill Japanese orders. The LEAF is presently marketed and sold in about a dozen countries — Japan, UK, throughout the EU, and also the US. I suspect year to date LEAF sales worldwide will top 10,000 units when they release their June report.