It's official, the Central Florida area (Orlando) will be an Early Adopter of EVs!
On February 2nd, we had a double header event which was officiated by the Mayor of Orange County, Richard Crotty, the Mayor of Orlando, Buddy Dyer, Nissan's Tracy Woodard, OUC's Byron Knibbs, and Progress Energy's Rob Caldwell. Here's what was announced...
- Orlando becomes a Partner City for RMI's Project Get Ready. We join 6 other cities that have been working with the Rocky Mountain Institute to get ready for electric vehicles. You can think of RMI's Project Get Ready as a recipe for how to rollout EV infrastructure in a given metro area. This recipe was created by RMI by talking to Govs, Vendors, Utilities, and Auto Manufactures and learning from past mistakes of prior EV launches in the 90s. This relationship also gets us access to all of this experience when we want too. Here's the website for "Get Ready Central Florida".
- Orlando becomes one of the Early Adopter cities for the Nissan Leaf. We join just 20 other cities that will be selling the Nissan Leaf this year. Together with the Project Get Ready initiative, we'll be working with Nissan to prepare Central Florida for the Leaf. You can read the details of this relationship below in the press release below.
The ceremony was at the Jefferson Street Parking Garage in Downtown Orlando...and although it's not the swankest place to have a ceremony, it worked out good because it was raining that day and no one had to get out in the weather to attend. The other reason to have it there was that the test cars are not street legal.
Centerstage was the "pretty" Nissan Leaf...the one that looks close to the final production version. There's only 2 of these on Earth now. The Leaf is very smart looking both inside and out and has a good amount of room inside. The instrument cluster is clean, easy to see, and "space age" - it reminds me of the bridge on Star Trek, The Next Generation. As a Carrot to get you to drive efficiently, you'll get little Tree icons when you drive sanely...and you'll hear a sawmill if you drive aggressively...just kidding about the sawmill.
After the ceremony, we were offered to drive the Leaf's ugly brother...the "mule". This version of the car is a Nissan Versa with the powertrain and battery which is close to the final production version. For my quick lap around the garage, the car accelerated great and I didn't notice any weirdness in the transition between regenerative and real breaking. The powertrain was very responsive and "snappy"...I'm looking forward to the real deal.
A couple of tidbits that I picked up from the Leaf's handlers are...
- Nissan will NOT be offering to lease the batteries if you buy the car...and Mitsubishi announced the same a few days ago. I think this is a good move as you can lease the whole car anyway...which is what I would do if I were worried about battery life.
- For the longest battery life, you should let the batteries deplete until a 30% State Of Charge and then charge them up to 80% SOC. You can program the car to only charge it up to 80% if you want...and this upper limit is preset when you use the Level 3 Fast Charger to manage the intense heat that is created during fast charging. Now we just need some time on the batteries to know HOW much longer the life will be if you follow different charge patterns. I'm thinking most people will just charge it 100% and charge it again when they get home no matter what the SOC.
I've been on the Steering Committee with "Get Ready Central Florida" since October 09 and I'm really excited about the future of EVs in Orlando. We've got the commitment from several key stakeholder groups (Gov't, Utilities, & Car Companies) and the group works well together. We're gearing up now to fill out our working groups with stakeholders in the community and we're planning some new events with other automakers...this will be fun!
As a Floridian, I've always been jealous of the progressive EV initiatives on the West Coast. However, after today, I don't have to be
so jealous anymore.
If you would like a presentation made to your group on the topic of EV infrastructure, just shoot me an email via my About page.
See the Nissan-Orlando press release below...