Nissan Swamped, Leaf Production at Full Throttle

The Nissan Leaf, on the market for some two months now, is still at the center of debate for most people in the automotive industry. The single mass-produced pure-EV to be currently marketed is probably the most talked about model these days, but all that chatter doesn't necessarily mean good news.

Last week, news of only 40 percent of the Leaf reservations turning into actual sales broke. Leaf detractors were enchanted. Now, the tide has turned, with new reports claiming that the appetite consumers have for the EV is causing quite a lot of headaches at the car maker's top levels.

According to Autonews, Nissan now has 27,000 orders for the Leaf. Great, analysts might say. Terrible, could answer the customers, because of the car maker's planned output of only 10,000 units through March 31.

For the remainder 17,000 people, the capped capacity at Nissan's plant means some long months of waiting. In order to avoid the avalanche of critics received in the beginning of the year from disgruntled customers, Nissan has stopped taking orders for the Leaf.

The next batch of customers will be allowed to place their orders “after we deliver enough volume to the first lot,” said Nissan. When that happens, nobody knows.

So, that's pretty much the whole story, as we know it today. On the one hand, we have those who say the Leaf is a dud, failing to match the number of reservations with actual sales. On the other hand, if that's true, Nissan couldn't be happier: after all, think at how the picture would look like if Nissan had say 50,000 orders and only 10,000 units production capacity.

Our take is that, despite malicious reports coming from one source or another, the Leaf is not losing ground to rival Volt. Even if you take into account only the number of people fighting for a Leaf and the debate surrounding it. Meanwhile, on the Volt front, no major troop movement reported.