for such a world-historical automotive event as this
The Leaf also represents one of the most daring bids for market dominance I've ever seen in the car business because no one, and I mean no one, knows if the damned thing will sell. Mr. Ghosn, also chief executive of Renault, has spent much of the past two years running around like a lunatic, striking deals with governments, utilities and public-private partnerships, and is investing billions in the EV business, with assembly halls and battery factories scattered all over the world. He has foreclosed the chicken-and-egg, EV-and-charging infrastructure objection by dropping his entire business on the henhouse.
If he wins, Renault-Nissan wins huge. If the loses, Mr. Ghosn will go down in history as the biggest CEO goat since Tony Hayward.
And yet, for such a world-historical automotive event as this, the Leaf driving experience is a curious nonevent. It occurs to me that among the infrastructural changes implied by the rise of EVs is the construction of a new critical vocabulary for electric cars. I can think of a hundred ways to describe a Maserati's ear-strafing exhaust note, but I'm rather at a loss to describe the nearly mute and rheostatic squeeze-and-go response of the Leaf. The braking system—a combination of a drag-inducing 3-kilowatt generator (regenerative braking) and conventional hydraulic brakes—has been electronically modulated to feel exactly like nothing in particular. The electric steering is likewise serviceably directional but devoid of anything you might call feel. To spend time in the Leaf is to appreciate how vivid and sensual a conventional automobile is, with its furious cylinder detonations, spinning cams, fisted gear-packs and lashing steel driveline. Compared with the Leaf, driving a Ferrari is like ingesting mescaline.
