There was something rather admirable about the original Nissan Leaf. It knew what it was. It did not pretend to be a sports car, a luxury lounge, or an extension of your digital identity. It was essentially a large domestic appliance with headlights. You plugged it in overnight, it wafted you about quietly the next day, and that was that.
I drove one years ago and quite liked it. It was basic, honest and faintly odd, like a Japanese fridge that somebody had accidentally registered with the DVLA. At the time it genuinely felt as though we might be entering a new era of simple, practical electric motoring for ordinary people.
I have just driven the latest version and the first thing that strikes you is that somewhere along the way the industry lost confidence in the entire idea of the electric car. Instead of refining the concept, simplifying it and making it cheaper, they appear to have concluded that what pensioners really want is an expensive rolling electronics package with a battery attached.
Everything now beeps. Everything flashes. Everything has a submenu. The dashboard resembles a failed attempt to recreate the flight deck of a 787 using two televisions and a gaming laptop. There are sensors monitoring your lane position, your speed, your eyelids, your parking, your reversing angle and, for all I know, your cholesterol. You climb in and the thing greets you by name. The seat glides backwards electrically like Captain Kirk preparing for departure. A touchscreen larger than my first television asks whether I would like to synchronise my wellness settings. Somewhere deep in the software a small animated leaf is probably congratulating me for regenerative braking while the car updates itself over WiFi.
Yet despite all this technological theatre, the actual useful range seems barely different from years ago. Worse still, the thing greets you with a wildly optimistic range estimate apparently calculated under laboratory conditions involving no heater, no air conditioning, no headlights and perhaps no passengers. The moment you turn on the climate control because you would quite like to survive winter with functioning toes, the projected range begins collapsing in front of your eyes like a badly managed pension fund.
Which is psychologically the wrong way round entirely. Why not calculate the range assuming normal use from the start? Heater on. Lights on. Actual human comfort permitted. Then, if you drive gently on a mild day without the climate control running, the range quietly increases instead. People like pleasant surprises. They do not like watching numbers fall while trapped in traffic on the A417.
It is rather like somebody taking a perfectly good kettle and deciding the problem with it was insufficient software integration. So now it glows blue, connects to WiFi, issues firmware updates, monitors your hydration levels and costs four times as much, while continuing to boil exactly the same amount of water.
And this is where the car industry is quietly missing an enormous market. Retired people are almost ideal electric car owners. Most have driveways. Most do fairly predictable journeys. Most are not attempting a high-speed assault on the Autobahn while towing a jet ski to Croatia. They want something comfortable, simple, cheap to run and easy to get in and out of. In other words, they want precisely what the first Leaf more or less was.
Instead, manufacturers keep adding weight, complexity and gizmos because somewhere in a boardroom somebody decided that a basic EV might not justify a £40,000 price tag. So the cars become ever more elaborate while ordinary people quietly keep their old petrol hatchbacks going for another decade out of sheer irritation.
The tragedy is that established manufacturers already knew perfectly well how to build simple, practical little cars. They spent decades refining exactly that formula. Then electrification arrived, handing them a once-in-a-generation opportunity to simplify the motor car mechanically, and they responded by turning it into a consumer electronics platform with wheels.
For much of the twentieth century, car makers understood perfectly well that the real breakthrough was not luxury motoring, but accessible motoring. What we actually need now is an electric People's Car. Not a luxury statement. Not an autonomous mobile wellness pod. Not a two-tonne techno-barge capable of reaching sixty in four seconds while displaying a map of nearby vegan coffee outlets. Just a simple, affordable electric car.
Plastic wheel trims. Physical buttons. Cloth seats. A heater that works. Enough range for ordinary life. Easy access. A proper spare wheel would be nice. A battery that can be replaced without requiring a second mortgage. Something that can survive ten years of supermarket car parks, garden centre excursions and mildly incompetent reversing.
The original Volkswagen Beetle succeeded because it gave ordinary people affordable transport they could understand and maintain. The Citroen 2CV did much the same by reducing motoring to the bare practical essentials. The original Mini squeezed remarkable usefulness into a tiny footprint, while the Smart Fortwo at least recognised that many people simply needed a compact urban runabout rather than a leather-lined command centre.
All of them started with the same basic question: what do ordinary people actually need? Modern EVs often feel designed around an entirely different question: how many expensive features can we add before the monthly finance payment becomes visible from space?
And then the industry wonders why so many people are hanging on to fifteen-year-old Hondas and Toyotas like survivors of a vanished sensible age. The industry does not need another electric spaceship. It needs the electric equivalent of a good cardigan.
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