Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: where smart happens. Hi Marshall Brain with today's question, why
Speaker 1: is the Nissan Leaf car that was announced this weekend
Speaker 1: such a big deal. It's true that the Nissan Leaf
Speaker 1: has gotten big headline since its announcement this weekend, but
Speaker 1: it's for good reason. This is the first real mass
Speaker 1: market electric car to be sold in the United States.
Speaker 1: It's a full size car, able to hold five passengers,
Speaker 1: and you'll be able to recharge it in your garage.
Speaker 1: General Motors did offer the e V one electric cars
Speaker 1: starting in but only about a thousand of those two
Speaker 1: seaters were built. Then GM canceled the program and destroyed
Speaker 1: all the cars in two thousand three. So the Leaf
Speaker 1: really is the start of a new era, and many
Speaker 1: experts have high hopes because the Leaf is a real car. First,
Speaker 1: it offers a hundred miles of travel per charge, plenty
Speaker 1: of range for typical day to day use in America. Second,
Speaker 1: it has plenty of power. A hundred and seven horsepower
Speaker 1: electric motor gives it brisk acceleration and a top speed
Speaker 1: of ninety miles per hour. Third, you can recharge it
Speaker 1: overnight in your garage, or you can go to a
Speaker 1: quick charge station where you can recharge it in just
Speaker 1: thirty minutes or less. Fourth, it's a reasonably priced car
Speaker 1: that will be very inexpensive to operate. Recharging the Leaf
Speaker 1: for the next hundred mile journey should cost less than
Speaker 1: one gallon of gasoline. And finally, it's a very green car.
Speaker 1: It produces no emissions at all while you're driving, it
Speaker 1: needs no motor oil or anti freeze, and it could
Speaker 1: significantly improve urban air quality if enough people buy them.
Speaker 1: You might have a question at this point. If the
Speaker 1: Leaf has all of these advantages and looks so promising,
Speaker 1: why is it taken so long for a car company
Speaker 1: to produce a real electric car. It's because electric cars
Speaker 1: are not quite as simple as they look. I mean,
Speaker 1: we play with little toy electric cars starting at age
Speaker 1: two or three, so electric cars seem trivial. In a
Speaker 1: toy car, there's a small electric motor and four double
Speaker 1: A batteries, but a real electric car is far more complicated.
Speaker 1: The biggest hurdle has been the battery pack. In particular,
Speaker 1: it's been the size, the cost, the range, the lifespan,
Speaker 1: and the safety of the battery pack that has been
Speaker 1: the problem. For example, if you tried to create the
Speaker 1: Nissan Leaf with lead acid batteries, the technology used by
Speaker 1: the big battery in your car now, the leaf would
Speaker 1: be impossible. The battery pack would need forty or fifty
Speaker 1: of those big batteries and they would weigh something close
Speaker 1: to a ton, They would only last a few years,
Speaker 1: and replacement batteries would cost something like five thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: The leaf would be impossible in this configuration. Nickel metal
Speaker 1: hydride batteries are smaller and lighter, but they're still problematic.
Speaker 1: So Nissan, in conjunction with Neck, has developed a new
Speaker 1: type of lithium ion battery for the leaf. This is
Speaker 1: the same technology powering your laptop computer. By comparison to
Speaker 1: lead acid and nickel metal hydride batteries, lithium ion batteries
Speaker 1: are small and light, but up until now they've been
Speaker 1: extremely expensive and prone to the occasional explosion. Nissan is
Speaker 1: using a new packaging technology that looks like an oversized
Speaker 1: sardine can, and apparently has been able to bring the
Speaker 1: cost down through economies of scale and innovative leasing arrangements,
Speaker 1: making the batteries safe enough to survive an accident and
Speaker 1: rugged enough to handle sweltering summer days, freezing winter nights,
Speaker 1: and all kinds of vibration has also been a challenge
Speaker 1: that Nissan apparently has overcome. With the battery problem solved,
Speaker 1: Nissan then had to solve many smaller problems. For example,
Speaker 1: in a traditional car, the air conditioner, the heat or
Speaker 1: the power stirring pump, the power brakes all take their
Speaker 1: power from the engine. In the leaf, the air conditioning
Speaker 1: and the power steering pumps need their own electric motors,
Speaker 1: and the heat is generated electrically instead of coming for
Speaker 1: free from excess engine heat. There's actually a little heat
Speaker 1: pump made out of the air conditioner to provide heat
Speaker 1: to the car. And then there's the recharging problem. The
Speaker 1: leaf has a four kilowatt hour battery pack. If you
Speaker 1: plug the leaf into a standard house outlet in the US,
Speaker 1: a full charge would take something like sixteen hours. Using
Speaker 1: something like the plug for an electric dryer would reduce
Speaker 1: the time to perhaps four hours. But what if you
Speaker 1: need to recharge fast? Nissan has developed a quick charge
Speaker 1: station that can do the job in thirty minutes or less.
Speaker 1: That's longer than it takes to fill a gas tank,
Speaker 1: but within the realm of reality. If these recharging stations
Speaker 1: were to spread normal gas stations and convenience stores, it
Speaker 1: wouldn't make electric cars nearly as convenient as gasoline model,
Speaker 1: and there is no way to refuel a gasoline car
Speaker 1: overnight in your garage. Taken altogether, the Leaf's features have
Speaker 1: the potential to open a whole new segment in the
Speaker 1: automotive world. It'll be interesting to see how other manufacturers respond.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics because
Speaker 1: at how stuff Works dot com,