How far we’ve come in 16 years. The first mass-produced electric car was the Nissan Leaf, unveiled in the summer of 2009. Until then, electric cars had tended to be tiny, dismal and austere, built to quadricycle rules that meant they weren’t really cars at all. When asked at the launch of the Leaf how it was any different, Nissan chief Carlos Tavares said, ‘It’s a real car.’
That first Leaf was a true pioneer, a modern day Ford Model T, and omedetou to Nissan for that. But I bet you weren’t banging on the gleaming glass door of your local Nissan dealership at 8am one Monday morning, waving your cheque book at the salesperson. It was slow, strange-looking, wouldn’t travel much further than 80 miles and charging it in public at the time was like watering a horse in the Empty Quarter.
Yet here we are on this sunny Welsh hillside, just over a decade and a half later, with five electric cars that will travel a great deal further than that first Nissan Leaf, display far more character while doing so, be better to drive and altogether more enjoyable to own (and in a couple of cases, very comparable on price too). In every sense, the game has moved on some distance. Importantly, I reckon there will be at least one car in this gathering that will cause all but the most hardened EV cynic to think some version of, ‘Actually, I quite like that…’
