THE all-electric Nissan LEAF has smashed its own sales record with a 33 per cent increase in European sales in 2014 over the previous year.
It took more than a quarter of the burgeoning electric car market, with 14,658* sales.
This year the Nissan LEAF has been joined by an unprecedented number of new entrants into the EV market and emerged as the leader on a global, US and European basis. Last year was the fourth in a row that the electric family car topped the zero-emission sales charts in Europe.
Moreover, the all-electric LEAF clocked up 4,051 sales in the UK, more than doubling the volume sold in 2013 (1,812). The British-built Nissan LEAF remains the nation’s electric model of choice, boasting 55 per cent of the pure EV market and outselling its nearest competitor by more than 2:1.
Guillaume Cartier, Nissan Europe Senior Vice-President of Sales and Marketing, explained the increase in sales, commenting: “We can now see the impact that word of mouth is having on our sales, with 95 per cent of our customers happy to recommend their car to a friend and 50 per cent saying they would never go back to diesel or petrol. This kind of powerful advocacy, combined with an increasing awareness of the massive running-cost savings electric car drivers experience, is why our Nissan LEAF sales continue to grow.”
He continued: “Data from our CarWings telematics system** shows us that Nissan LEAF drivers drive 40 per cent more kilometres than the European average for petrol or diesel cars, covering over 16,500 km per year. This data demonstrates that this car is the primary car for many households and that is changing the consumer perception of electric cars.”
The Nissan LEAF was launched in early 2011 in the European market, followed by a revised version introduced in mid-2013 with more than 100 improvements led by customer feedback. The Nissan LEAF is built in Sunderland, with batteries constructed in a new purpose-built facility on the same site. In June 2014, the 100 per cent electric Nissan e-NV200 light commercial vehicle was launched, built at Nissan’s Barcelona factory, with batteries from Sunderland.
* Figure used is industry-standard registrations sourced from official national sources. Nissan-recorded retail sales for the Nissan LEAF in 2014 was 15,096 cars.
** European owners of its 100 per cent electric car, the Nissan LEAF, travel more than 40 per cent further per year (10,307 miles) than the European average for a traditional internal combustion-powered vehicle (7,170 miles). Average is calculated from 2013 market-specific annual average statistics using data from the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden and Norway. An even weighting was applied to each country to find a ‘European average’. A German statistic was not used in the European average as the raw data is not available, and all average figures used in calculations are estimates.