Living with a Nissan Leaf

After five months with our Nissan Leaf long-term test car, here are our thoughts on electric motoring.

PROS:

• Our year's savings on petrol could pay for a holiday. On average, in the past, I have filled one tank a month. Since September, when I started using the Leaf full time, I have filled only one tank – for a long trip in the family bus Peugeot 5008. So the 2p per mile cost of running the Leaf electric car (setting aside purchase cost) will have saved us at least £300.

• I have my own parking space in the heart of our town which is always empty. No matter if it's Saturday morning or the middle of a busy working day, the two spaces for electric cars – with recharging points – which the council has provided at the municipal car park will always be vacant. It's bliss. I don't even have to buy a ticket to park (though you do have to pay for the electricity).

• The Leaf sets you apart (if you like that sort of thing). Never mind your Bentleys and Ferraris: if you go out in a Leaf, you can bet you won't see another. Ours seems to be the only one in daily use in Scotland, where I live. People stop and stare when it glides silently by.

• It's one of the best-built cars I've driven. Nissan reckons the 24 kWh lithium-ion battery will be good for 10 years. Nobody can be sure about that claim until 2023; but I'm confident the body and structure will last, in good order, at least a decade. No car that costs less than £100,000 feels more solid and resolutely built. With all the weight of that battery under the floor, its ride is as fluent and composed as a presidential limousine.

• It heats up instantaneously, even in the depths of winter. If you switch on the Leaf's window heaters on a frosty morning, the ice on the glass dissolves in seconds. Internal combustion engines take an age to warm the air in a car (and, meanwhile, their tailpipes are putting out noxious gases and carbon matter); but the zero-emissions Leaf gets cosy inside in no time.

• It is changing my family's way of life. Since the Leaf arrived, I have embarked on a full-scale programme of reform to cut our household energy consumption. By the end of this year, I should be charging the car for free during the day with electricity generated from our own solar panels and CHP boiler, pumped through our Pod Point charging unit.

CONS:

• I'd certainly love ours less if I'd had to pay for it. The Leaf we've got at home would cost £30,000-plus (less the £5,000 grant the Government gives to purchasers of every electric car). That's double the cost of a similar-size Focus or Golf. You'd have to keep the Leaf for at least 10 years to save that much money on fuel.

• They talk about range anxiety. Heart-stopping terror is more like it. The Leaf's nominal range of 80-plus miles on a fully charged battery is as fanciful as the mpg figures manufacturers publish for conventional cars. Any round trip of more than 60 miles might give you a seizure as you watch the meter run down. More than once I have had to creep home with everything switched off, looking out through a tiny slot of unmisted windscreen.

THE FACTS

Nissan Leaf

Price as tested: £31,600 (less £5,000 gov’t grant)

Power: 80kW

Top speed: 90mph

Acceleration: 0-62 mph in 11.5sec

Average energy consumption: 150Wh/km

CO2 Emissions: nil