What the heck is wrong w/ GM, that they can't come up with some originality. Leaf says, "we'll be available this December" ... so GM moves their 1st delivery dates up even earlier. Leaf says, "charger included" ... GM says charger included. Oh wait ... the PRICE. Nope, they haven't tried to match Leaf on that. .
hmmm. there is already something like 17,000 people on a pre-order list with $99 reservations that is slated to have an initial launch # of 4700 vehicles. already Nissan is scrambling to up the production time schedule to meet its unexpected demand.
Dave, the 17,000 (and growing) is only here in the U.S. ... I could be wrong, but I thought I'd read somewhere on Nissan's site that world wide, the wait list is in 80,000's .
60,000 is the single-market minimum for a vehicle to be considered mainstream. To be a game-changer, production must exceed and sales must sustain that quantity. .
For the GM haters, GM did indeed announce production dates before Nissan did. I read about the free chargers from ford before nissan or gm. The trick is small production numbers compared to buyers. Since the leaf and volt won't be produced in large quantities anytime very soon. The US government is puting up a big incentive here, and other governments are for the leaf as well. I don't think the demand is all that unexpected. It's not anything that blows auto analysts away. Nissan is floating pretty big numbers for demand on the out years. Add to that these are refundable deposits, we really won't know much until customers start taking delivery. Nissan pegged their 4/11-3/12 yearly production at 50K Leaf world wide. They cleaim they have battery capacity of 65K in the time period and are talking about increasing production plans to that level because of all the deposits. Those aren't really hard numbers to hit even in a bad economy. They will not be able to come up to john1701a's number for mainstream until 2012 when the US battery plant and Leaf factory are planned to start production.
Those aren't my numbers. That's the criteria they set for judging Prius. So, turn about is fair play. .