Nissan Leaf battery pack unveiled

"Nissan broke ground on a new battery plant in Smyrna, Tennessee yesterday (figuratively, anyway, the actual bulldozing doesn't start for a few weeks). For now, we will call this the U.S. Leaf battery plant, but it's really part of Nissan's strategy to electrify more and more of its vehicles. As we mentioned yesterday, once it is up and running at the end of 2012, the plant will have the capacity to make 200,000 battery packs a year. The nearby vehicle assembly facility where the U.S.-built Leafs will come to life will have a maximum capacity to make 150,000 Leafs a year alongside other Nissan vehicles like the Altima and Pathfinder. The extra capacity, if used, could be sold to other automakers or go into non-Leaf Nissan products.

In Smyrna yesterday, Nissan's director of product planning, Mark Perry, gave AutoblogGreen some more information on the Leaf battery pack. As we know, Nissan says the 24 kWh pack gives the Leaf a 100-mile range on the gentle LA4 cycle (meaning it probably isn't a totally reliable guide to estimate real-world driving). Still, this means the test packs have been charged and discharged a lot, because Perry said Nissan has done "hundreds of thousands" of miles of reliability testing on the battery packs, including dunking them in a pool and freezing them. Not that we'd expect him to say anything different, but Perry is confident that the battery pack is totally safe.

What's in the pack? 48 modules, each with four cells (so, 192 cells total) arranged in a big square. The part that sits under the real seat is a little taller than the rest, as the modules are stacked vertically while the other modules lay horizontal under the front seats and floor. The entire pack weighs around 600 pounds and contains around 9 pounds of lithium. How will people use the Leaf? Find out Nissan's expectations after the jump..."

http://green.autoblog.com/2010/05/27/details-on-nissan-leaf-battery-pack-including-how-recharging-sp/

...not because I hate the environment, but because the English teacher in me recoils from the prospect of a decade of commercials and stories about Nissan Leafs.

It's 'Leaves', dammit.

And the Toronto NHL franchise is wrong too.

Since it is a proper noun and all that I'm taking your comment as tongue-in-cheek.

On another note I'd offer that it isn't the English teacher in you so much as an idiosyncratic preference for a certain version of order. Many English teachers actually revel in the flexibility and adaptability of language.

for a lot of reasons and one of those reasons it will be shown that many people, us included, are ready for an EV to tool around in.