Nissan marks World EV Day with grandiose Leaf marketing
Nissan wants you to consume your way to reduced greenhouse emissions. By buying an under-engineered electric car. Here’s why the experiment won’t work…
In Nissan happy news, the Japanese carmaker continues its brave battle with Renaultblastoma.
Nissan built an all-new electric car - its predecessor dogged by battery failures - yet didn’t include active cooling.
As an offshoot of its research into this bizarre condition, the company has discovered the human gullibility gene - with 500,000 confirmed cases so far, worldwide.
Nissan’s bold experiment is ongoing - just last month clocking over a total of 500,000 Leaf electric vehicles deployed among the human race for testing purposes.
Sobering stuff, isn’t it? Half a million EVs out there with no liquid cooling system on the batteries, almost guaranteed to fail early - kinda screams 'environmental disgrace’ - at least to me.
World EV day was September 9th just gone (and I forgot to buy a cake) which also marked the Nissan experiment’s half-million-unit milestone.
One of the salient defining characteristics of life today is the toxic ecosystem of information delivery. Companies which feel free to make any statement and journalists with no technical training and (even if they do) their balls are cut off, vis-a-vis calling this crap out for what it truly is.
So let’s break it down:
2.4 billion kilos is 2.4 million tonnes. Of CO2. Sounds a lot, but is, in reality, about half of one per cent of Australia’s annual greenhouse emissions for one year. So - every leaf ever sold over 10 years represents an alleged offset of half of one per cent of one per cent of the world’s greenhouse emissions. For just one year.
Of course, the grandiose Nissan CO2-saving claim does not include the emissions embodied in manufacturing all those Leafs, nor the emissions cost of repairing the pandemic of prematurely dead batteries, which fail early because of inherent R&D deficiency - no liquid cooling system preventing the batteries overheating on recharge.
Conclusion: Half a million Leafs stretch roughly from Melbourne to Brisbane - about 2000 kilometres along the south-eastern Australian seaboard. And that’s their decade-long contribution to saving the friggin planet. Humanity cannot therefore hope to tackle greenhouse with EVs. The problem is too huge in scale for this kind of alleged intervention to be effective.
Second conclusion: The car industry needs to stop this disgraceful greenwashing of itself. Humanity cannot hope to consume its way to a planet-saving future. Carmakers simply say anything to sell you a car. Any car. Any appeal to any altruistic vulnerability have, will do.
If you are susceptible to the notion of saving the planet - Nissan (and others) will concoct a bullshit message to get you over the line. In fact, the greenest car on earth is - pretty much - the 10-year-old Corolla the median motorist down under probably already owns. This is pretty sad, but also quite true.
