Unveiled in August 2009 and built from October 2010 at Nissan’s Oppama plant, the original Leaf grew out of three in-house prototypes (the Cube-based EV-01 and EV-02, and the Tiida-based EV-11) into the first electric car sold at real volume rather than leased to fleets, as Nissan’s earlier Altra and Hypermini had been.[1] US and UK production followed from 2013, at Smyrna, Tennessee and Sunderland respectively.
Its range is the clearest case in this entry of a manufacturer’s own figure diverging from an independent regulator’s: Nissan quoted 160 km on the NEDC cycle, while the EPA’s own five-cycle test, the more rigorous of the two, rated it at 117 km, a gap wide enough that the US Federal Trade Commission publicly challenged the EPA’s own number as still too generous. This entry records the EPA figure, not Nissan’s, as the independently regulated measurement.