Originally Posted By: ecotourist
I've been doing a bit of reading on EV cars. The Nissan Leaf is not the pick of the litter. It is said to have: a relatively short range especially for the early models, a battery that is not cooled (and which gets overheated in use, shortening its life), and an expensive and non backwards compatible battery. But it's also fun to drive and (aside from an expensive replacement battery every few years) very economical to operate.
The Leaf was marketed as the first electric car that wasn't an experiment, expensive or a Tesla. It has a short range, but Nissan marketed it as a city car - it's built off the Versa platform but since the batteries had to fit into the same space for a fuel tank as well as the fact it was 1st gen Li-Ion tech the range isn't spectacular. It certainly sold more than the Fit EV and Toyota's RAV4 EV(which was basically a Model S in a RAV4 shell, Tesla built the battery packs and drivetrain what was shipped to Toyota in Canada).
I've ridden in one, it's not a speed demon but it felt good even though Nissan is the king of cost cutting. At least it wasn't an insult to the driver like the Chevy Spark EV was.
The Prius hackers are already hacking together "replacement" batteries from known-good cells but with so-so quality. Nissan isn't using 18650 Li-Ion battery cells in the Leaf's battery pack from what I've heard. The next Leaf could be using a battery pack with commodized cells, given Nissan's ties to Samsung via Renault Samsung Motors and LG is already tied up with GM and Hyundai.