A few weeks ago I was corresponding with a GTI buddy about reprogramming the headlights in my car and somehow we got sidetracked to the new Golf R coming to the U.S. next year. It’s easy enough to get jazzed about another 50 horsepower and all wheel drive. I offered encouragement that he buy one – this after all is what car friends are for – but he said he’d just traded his VW on a Nissan Leaf, and I noted didn’t exactly gush with enthusiasm about the transaction.
To go from a GTI to a… Leaf? My heart sank to the bottom. What could be next for the poor S.O.B.? Trying out for castrato?
But then driving in town recently I saw a Leaf (certainly didn’t hear it), and as luck would have it we were headed in the same general direction so I had a chance to study it a bit. Much to my surprise it looked like a real car; of course it is a real car as opposed to an illusionary car but still it surprised me. It made its way in traffic rather peppily and I even found its bulbous butt kinda cute. The “Zero Emission” sticker, well, ok… but have you hung around a coal fired power plant lately? The sticker is misleading and has to go.
In the mean time, big oil in Montana and North Dakota is big news and a report from NPR states the U.S. is sitting on an estimated 2 trillion barrels of crude, making the Middle East and North Africa’s combined 1.2 trillion look rather ho-hum. With BMW, Ford and Mitsubishi all coming on line with mass market electric vehicles next year, who knows? Timing is everything and there’s nothing worse than bad timing.
I’m most definitely not trading in my GTI any time soon - 39 mpg at 65 mph thank you Volkswagen - but I am going to drive a Leaf just for the heck of it. Before they blow away.
Gordon Bunker
photo thanks to ecoautoninja
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