Our first month, 1100 miles and still smiling!

The idea of having an Electric Vehicle (EV) as a second car came when my wife started talking about getting a small "green" second car as a run-a-round, with good MPG for school and station runs. With ever increasing fuel costs, this seemed a good idea but we also needed it to be able to cope with our weekly animal feed runs of corn, pellets, goat mix, hay and straw bails!

So we looked at what our average mileage would be in the second car and calculated that during term time this would be between 40-50 miles a day. It then occurred to us that if we were going to get a "green" second car, why not go for one with the lowest emission possible? That meant looking at Electric cars. 

 As we live in the middle of the Kent countryside, the thought of a EV vehicle had not even crossed our minds as we are far from being the typical type customer. 

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We first looked at the Mitsubishi i-MiEV and the rest of the family thought I was joking when I suggested when one day when in Eastbourne, of booking a test drive. 

We took the car out two of us at a time with the salesman, and I was pleased to see the big smile on my wife's face as she and our daughter climbed out after the first test drive. After my son I returned from our drive we all agreed how fun, quite and enjoyable it was to drive and realized that an electric car would work for us.

Having now driven our first electric car, we thought we better take a look at another model to compare and started to see what else there was on the market, closer to home. Whilst the i-MiEV is a great little car, the Nissan Leaf has far more room for our animal feeds, and is better equipped, including rear parking camera, so the decision on which to go for was an easy one to make.

So having driven nearly 1,100 miles in our first month we are so far very pleased with the Leaf which has performed as well as we had expected.  

Also pleased to see the Nissan Leaf in the new Apple iPhone 4s siri video - see it here.

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