. (Future? No, a fig Leaf)É por estas e por outras que por vezes os "velhos do Restelo" vão sobrevivendo
. Mas começamos a sentir o nervosismo que estes inergúmenos "petrolheads" com o aumento das vendas dos VE's pelo mundo 
.
The Nissan Leaf has just arrived in New York City. It’s a real breakthrough for anyone who was getting tired of all the old synonyms for failure.
"The new all-electric Leaf, which (in theory) is powered by plugging it into an ordinary outlet, is going to make Ryan Leaf look like a success story.
Nissan’s Leaf isn’t as flawed and ridiculous as the Edsel. It’s far worse.
The 1958 Edsel, ugly and mediocre as it was, with its vertical slash like a gaping wound symbolizing all the red ink that gushed onto Ford’s balance sheet, became a laughingstock not because it was so far out of the ordinary, but because the public had been whipped into expecting the extraordinary.
But at least only Ford lost money on the Edsel. We’re all losing money on the Nissan Leaf, thanks to the taxpayer subsidies that willed it into the marketplace. Each time you see one of these glorified golf carts flit by, you should be thinking: There goes $7,500 of my money.
The Leaf’s range is a joke — early reviewers have been startled to notice the gauge of a fully charged car warning that it expects to go only about 65 miles, a bit shy of Nissan’s claims last year of a 138-mile range.
One owner complained that the real range is only 50 miles.
Moreover, the gauge isn’t reliable. Here I take pleasure at introducing a delightful new usage: “to turtle.”
Drivers have been saying on online forums that when the gauge tells them they’ve still got five or 10 or 15 miles of juice left, the vehicle instead goes dead.
But first comes a really cute warning sign of an orange turtle icon to symbolize the battery’s tragically slow-moving death crawl. You thought you were in a car, but suddenly you’re driving a turtle. A few minutes after that, you’re not driving at all. You’re sitting in a paperweight.
Leaf lovers have been boasting that the car goes zero to 60 quite nicely. Unfortunately it goes 60 to zero with even more breathtaking alacrity.
Feel pretty secure about taking this baby out on the highway? Like I said: golf cart.
But don’t worry: Nissan has promised to cover your towing fees if the car turtles out on you. They won’t be compensating you for the pain and suffering of enduring the wrecker crew snickering at you and your precious little wind-up automobile. (One Leaf driver who turtled was asked by a mechanic why he couldn’t just get a jump start.)
At 300 W. 57th St., Popular Mechanics has installed what seems to be the first Leaf-charging station in the city. The cost? Over $2,000. But PM’s home is a major commercial building. Your house probably isn’t, so it won’t be able to handle that kind of an outlet without a costly upgrade of the electrical system. You’ll also need a special permit and inspection.
Hey, wait — the Leaf is supposed to run on ordinary household current, right? That means it’s useless for most apartment dwellers (go ahead, ask your landlord if you can run an extension cord to the building’s power supply) but fine for suburbanites. Only those suburbanites who have a lot of time on their hands, though: a PM test driver said it took 34 hours to recharge his Leaf using ordinary 120-volt household power. “For most people,” the gearhead magazine sheepishly noted, “the time constraint might preclude using the Leaf for everyday commuting.”
Ya think? A vehicle that takes a day and a half to charge can’t be used every day? Wasn’t the whole purpose of the Leaf supposed to be short everyday commuting? What good is it if you can only use it Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays? The Leaf’s failures recall an old joke people used to tell about the Jaguar in the ’70s: If you want a Jag, you need three of them — one in the shop, one for parts, one to drive.
The Leaf, the clean, green vehicle, which even with the subsidy costs over $25,000, isn’t powered by that nasty carbon-packed fossil fuel gasoline. Nope — it’s most likely powered by coal, which is what supplies about half of the power stations where households get electricity.
President Obama is not in the habit of admitting to being wrong about anything, and in his Wednesday energy speech he solemnly reaffirmed his utter devotion to wishful thinking and naivety, promising the federal government would buy only alternative-fuel automobiles by 2015.
The US has about as much chance of becoming “energy-independent” this century as the earth has of becoming independent of the sun. And the Honda Civic-sized smugmobile the Nissan Leaf — powered by coal, corporate welfare and a regressive taxation scheme that takes from everyone but benefits only those who can afford to drop over $25,000 on a toy slash personality statement — is to 21st century economics what the Edsel was to 1950s aesthetics."
Em: http://m.nypost.com/f/mobile/news/opini ... BZlqOGNtYL
