Patrolling the interwebs for TTAC-worthy content, we find a woman selling Nissan Leafs on the streets of Davos. Rachel Konrad, formerly spokesperson of Tesla, is now the Communications Director of the Renault-Nissan Alliance. Her boss Carlos Ghosn is a fixture at the World Economic Forum, which ends today in Davos. Rachel is using the fact that Davos has received more snow than in the 42 years before to praise the virtues of the Leaf in winter weather. At the same time, three topless women steal her thunder and get arrested.
Ms. Konrad says that the Leaf is perfect on slippery roads, because there is no lag between touching the accelerator and the car getting torque. Also, an electric motor is impervious to the altitude sickness that besets the ICE. Ms. Konrad forgets that people think something else when they see snow and an EV: Won’t running on battery be just awful when it’s cold?
Thankfully, her Japanese colleagues at Nissan just came back from Hokkaido, which is a stone-throw from Siberia. There, they covered that topic. Here is the video.
Back to women of Davos. Three women from the Ukraine demonstrated how easy it is to get attention: They took their tops off. Works all the time. After they climbed a fence and attacked a female police officer, they were arrested. A massive media contingent then set out to pixelate video and to close-crop photographs. Jobs creation in action!
Nevertheless, in a prude company (or in prude company), watching the following report from snowy Davos may get you in hot water.
Watch out with those pointy fences girls…Terrible shame if something was to go horribly wrong.
Communism rules!
Wow, davos is usually so boring, guess I ought to pop on down there more often! (45min away.)
Not too poor to afford to travel, wonder what the backstory is there!
I never thought about it, but wouldn’t that whole “full torque at zero rpm” trait be totally undesirable in the snow?
Particularly when coupled with regen on coasting, and no clutch to press to disengage the engine from the wheels. But maybe Nissan has though of that one.
If it were my system, I wouldn’t allow re-gen braking within 3 or 4 degrees of freezing…
Don’t be too rough on these women, they have high standards. A lot of women from the Ukraine will take their tops off for much less than Davos level bankers.
When did European channels start (poorly) blurring breasts? RT is Russian, but even they shouldn’t have a problem with breasts as long as there isn’t anything bad about Putin written on them.
It’s the dang pixillator Police. They’re everywhere!
Okay , so Leaf response time and weight distribution … WAIT, where is the unpixelated version ??
Great, now do the same test at night, with the lights on, heat on full blast, seat heaters on, and with the windshield wipers on. I for one would like to see how long the battery lasts in those conditions.
Excellent, we need to see more of this type of demonstrating in the US. Unfortunately, too many Americans are at the mall picking their noses and pulling out their overextended credit cards buying shoes with lights in them (thank you Geo Carlin).
Please don’t… It is very difficult to find American female protesters in the similar quality. Most are over weight with hairy armpit.
at first,I thought it was a frat party in Madison.
OK, OK, they win. I’ll give them a place to sleep for a few days.
It’s more than just lights and a heater that reek in an electric car. Batteries suffer from cold weather and lost power rapidly unless they have been developed more while I was sleeping.
Not considering anything else, a volt would be preferable to a leaf because it can be charged without plugging it in. I never thought I would prefer anything about a Chevy over a Nissan.
Yes you have been sleeping.
You are probably talking nickel or lead acid batteries, or even the old lithium cobalt oxide ones.
The state of the art in battery chemistries and construction methods has moved on.
Even lithium-ion suffer from the cold, expect the Leaf to get about 50 miles of range in those conditions.
There are no “lithium-ion” batteries.
Which chemistry are you talking about ? Li-MnO2? LiFePO4 ? What type of anode construction ?
savuporo,
Are the latest batteries impervious to the cold?
I though pretty much all chemical reactions slowed down as temperatures dropped. Am I completely off, or is is just that in newer batteries, the effect is much less dramatic, to the point of being negligible?
No battery is impervious to the cold – and neither are gas engines. As evidenced by the widespread use of block heaters in a lot of cold climate places.
First, it’s important to understand there is no “one size fits all” with batteries, different battery chemistries and construction types have different properties, making them better or less suitable for particular applications. There are applications where burst discharge rate is the most important property, there are applications where shelf life matters above all else, and obviously there are applications where gravimetric energy density is the king, and so on and so forth.
Hence, also, all battery choices are tradeoffs in some way. Boston Power and Saft for example offer special construction lithium chemistry batteries primarily designed for military applications, that can operate down to -40C – but it trades off discharge rate and capacity.
Nissan has done their engineering trades for Leaf, and obviously come to a setup with satisfactory capacity and cold weather performance for their target markets.
The blanket “batteries die in cold!” shouts are just ignorant.
Gas engines lose very little range in the cold, even without a block heater.
If you want to cure our ignorance, you should provide some numbers. As it is, you’ve used multiple posts and paragraphs to tell us nothing about any sort of battery’s actual cold weather performance. As someone who lives in a cold climate, I’d be interested in knowing. I’ve found very little information during past searches.
What happens to a Leaflet in the snow with its high beams on? Does its battery become ‘poor because of you’?
Ms. Konrad says that the Leaf is perfect on slippery roads, because there is no lag between touching the accelerator and the car getting torque.
At least we know she’s a true automotive enthusiast! Most people wouldn’t even notice how badly modern electronic throttles tend to lag.