Photo: Chasing Cars
Look around you while out in the open, and chances are within a short period of time, an electric car will pass by. There’s already a lot of them out there, of various makes, sizes, and ranges, and a hell of a lot more will come soon enough.
Commercially, electric vehicles have been around for about a decade or so. When it all started, it was probably Tesla that sung the arrival of the EVs, but given how the U.S. company was not a mainstream carmaker at the time, the established behemoths decided to stay on the side and see where it was all going. All of them, except one: Nissan.
The Japanese were quick to jump aboard the electrification train, launching what is generally considered the first mass-produced, successful EV from one of the industry’s (at the time) pillars: the Leaf.
In the ten years that have passed, around half a million of them have been sold in 59 markets on three continents. Combined, the army of Leafs covered some 10 billion miles (16 billion km), a figure Nissan itself made public in December 2020, helping keep out 2.5 million tons of CO2 of the air we breathe.
That’s quite the achievement, but it doesn’t change the fact that, just like to Toyota Prius back in its day, the thing is damn ugly.
But maybe that’s a trait of the modern age, and the Leaf would have looked entirely different had it been made back in the glory days of Datsun. Imagine that, the looks of an old-fashioned Datsun, wrapped around the electric powertrain of the Leaf, and sent into the world decades in advance…
The rendering attached to this piece shows just that, courtesy of the guys over at Chasing Cars. The idea is part of a larger effort to envision how some of the most prominent electrified cars of our day would have looked in the 1960s. We’ve already shown you the Tesla Model X and the BMW i8, as they boast the looks of the International Harvester Scout and BMW 507, respectively.
The Japanese were quick to jump aboard the electrification train, launching what is generally considered the first mass-produced, successful EV from one of the industry’s (at the time) pillars: the Leaf.
In the ten years that have passed, around half a million of them have been sold in 59 markets on three continents. Combined, the army of Leafs covered some 10 billion miles (16 billion km), a figure Nissan itself made public in December 2020, helping keep out 2.5 million tons of CO2 of the air we breathe.
That’s quite the achievement, but it doesn’t change the fact that, just like to Toyota Prius back in its day, the thing is damn ugly.
But maybe that’s a trait of the modern age, and the Leaf would have looked entirely different had it been made back in the glory days of Datsun. Imagine that, the looks of an old-fashioned Datsun, wrapped around the electric powertrain of the Leaf, and sent into the world decades in advance…
The rendering attached to this piece shows just that, courtesy of the guys over at Chasing Cars. The idea is part of a larger effort to envision how some of the most prominent electrified cars of our day would have looked in the 1960s. We’ve already shown you the Tesla Model X and the BMW i8, as they boast the looks of the International Harvester Scout and BMW 507, respectively.
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