The new Leaf is clearly style-conscious.
Japanese automaker Nissan is very proud of their new Leaf, and rightly so. The Leaf may be one of the most versatile mass-market electric vehicles out there, but it failed to strike a truly significant chord despite beating most companies in the EV race by a good decade or so. With the new model, Nissan aims to go after more style-conscious buyers (as evident by the Leaf v2’s rather pretty suit), but it appears that there’s one more area left for them to explore.
Speaking to Autocar, Nissan design boss Alfonso Albaisa said that the company was exploring the idea of a “racier” Leaf variant to reach out to a younger, more image-conscious crowd. Albaisa made it clear that a Nismo variant of the Leaf was only natural, given the company’s existing offering of Nismo enhancement packages for most of its models.
“The previous Leaf’s design wasn’t popular with the majority of people, so its look couldn’t contribute to sales. The new car is lower, wider and sportier, with the point of this design being to get greater accessibility of the market.” — Alfonso Albaisa, Senior Vice President of Design, Nissan Motor Company
With a press release, Nissan shed further details on the upcoming concept, which sees the exterior of the car see significant reworking that the company claims decreases lift while leaving the cars' excellent drag coefficient undisturbed. The cabin of the Leaf Nismo Concept also sees bespoke touches, with red accents dotted around the interior to give it a proper high-performance feel.
Not limited to just aesthetics, the Leaf Nismo Concept gets bespoke "sports-tuned suspension" married to high-performance rubber, which receive power from a custom-tuned ECU that sharpens up the Leaf's driving characteristics to offer a truly involving experience.
The new Nissan Leaf has already gone on sale in Japan, with deliveries in Europe expected to commence by January 2018. The Japanese carmaker’s local arm has confirmed that the Leaf is due to arrive on Australian shores, which we posit should be sometime in Q1 next year.
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