Green vehicle development, while small, continues to grow dramatically for what it is. We saw this just the other day in Ford’s announcement about record hybrid sales, and now the global Renault-Nissan Alliance is out with news it has just sold its 100,000th zero-emissions car. Nissan commands the lion’s share of this number, with over 71,000 Leaf sales globally.
Not surprisingly, the 100,000th electric vehicle from the manufacturers in this Alliance sold was a Leaf. It went to one American graduate student Allison Howard, who drives the car to Kennesaw State University in Atlanta, Georgia. The other bookend of this – the first car sold – was also Nissan’s electric car. That vehicle was purchased back in December 2010 by engineer Olivier Chalouhi in California’s Silicon Valley.
Renault, for its part, has sold about 30,000 electric vehicles since its first model, Kangoo Z.E., went on sale in late 2011. It leads the European electric vehicle market share with a 61% share, including Twizy, which to date has seen sales of around 11,000 units. In addition to these two electric vehicles, it also offers the Fluence Z.E. sedan and the subcompact ZOE, launched earlier this year. This latter EV has a range of 210 km and has thus far sold around 5,000 times.
Nissan, meanwhile, continues to dominate the electric vehicle landscape, to date selling 30,000 in the United States, 28,000 in Japan and 12,000 in Europe. Norway seems to have a particularly love affair for the Leaf, with it being one of the top 10 vehicles sold there overall, in addition to Nissan’s best selling model at the moment. More than than 4,600 people have bought the car there alone, with probable motivators for that being that “EVs in Norway are exempt from value added tax (VAT) and road tolls, and they have access to bus lanes and free parking.”
Impressively, electric cars from Renault and Nissan have driven approximately 841 million zero-emission kilometers — enough to circle the earth more than 20,000 times. Together, they represent 53 million liters of oil saved and 124 million kg of CO2 that have not been emitted.