EV beats Hybrid
With Nissan just reporting LEAF sales for 2014 of 30,200, up 33 percent from 22,610 from 2013, I thought it would be a good time to revisit how the first four years of LEAF sales compared with the first four years of the Toyota Prius – the undisputed champion of the hybrid vehicle market.
To help out with this analysis, I went to the Alternative Fuels Data Center of the U.S. Department of Energy website (found here.) This is a great source of information about all things Alternative Fuels. Within their great storehouse of information is a data chart that shows hybrid electric vehicle sales by model since 1999. The Prius was introduced in the United States in 2000. Here is a chart of Prius sales from 2000 to 2003.
The opening paragraph of this article provides LEAF sales, so you already know how this story turns out. Also, the headline is kind of a spoiler. Let’s look at the rest of the data anyway. I’ve pulled the LEAF sales data directly from Nissan’s published information.
Next up is a cumulative sales chart that shows the sales performance of these two vehicles compared over the first four years.
One important point to note – Prius sales gained 22 percent from year three to year four. LEAF sales gained over 33 percent at the same point in its timeline. My feeling is that when LEAF 2.0 comes out with significantly greater driving range, we should expect to see sales ramp up dramatically from current levels.