Was it ever time to declare the Nissan Leaf a flop?

Remember the Nissan Leaf sales figures in 2012? It was pretty dismal. While looking something else up I just came across this Time Magazine article from September 2012: Is It Time to Declare the Nissan Leaf a Flop?

Well.. Looking back at that, Leaf (and Volt and Model S) sales have improved a LOT from a year ago. The growth rate in electric car sales is pretty strong – TODAY. A year ago, that wasn’t the story.

What happened? The 2013 Leaf happened

, coupled with a significant price decrease for the Leaf, coupled with starting Leaf manufacturing in the US. All together that has enabled a large jump in Leaf manufacturing and Leaf sales.

With the 2013 Leaf, Nissan fixed a large number of issues that Leaf owners had been complaining about. They improved the range a bit. The base MSRP became $28,800, which is within the range of the Hybrid cars before any federal tax cuts and gets close to $20,000 after tax cuts. Leaf sales are running at 2000 a month or so, for the whole year.

It’s enough that here in the SF Bay Area I’m seeing Leaf’s every time I go out.

Is anybody at Time Magazine going to return to that article and say “Whoops, I guess we got that one wrong”???

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About David Herron

David Herron is a writer and software engineer living in Silicon Valley. He primarily writes about electric vehicles, clean energy systems, climate change, peak oil and related issues. When not writing he indulges in software projects and is sometimes employed as a software engineer. David has written for sites like PlugInCars and TorqueNews, and worked for companies like Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.