Chris Paine’s 2006 documentary asked, “Who killed the electric car?” Now he’s driving a Nissan Leaf — the first mass-produced fully electric automobile.

by Ezra Dyer

Excuse me, but do you have any outdoor power outlets?” I’m checking into a Courtyard Marriott in L.A., and I’ve got a dilemma: My car needs a fill-up. Because that car is a Nissan Leaf, that means I need an outlet. I explain my situation to the guy at the front desk, who thinks for a moment and replies, “If I gave you a room on the ground floor and you parked outside, could you plug it into your room?” A few minutes later, I’m going through my normal hotel-arrival procedure, with one modification: After plugging in my phone and my computer, I also plug in my car.

For someone whose driving habits are calibrated to the internal combustion engine (which is to say, all of us), the Leaf requires some mental reprogramming: You’re not just thinking about where you need to go right now — you’re thinking about where you’re going tomorrow, and how many spare electrons it’ll take to get there.

This is the frontier of the electric car. Someday this story will seem absurd. You had to park outside and plug into your hotel room? Ha! That’s so 2011. But right now, driving an electric vehicle still requires some creativity.

I’m in L.A. to meet with Chris Paine, the man who most famously used the EV1 as his muse. He directed the 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, which took General Motors to task for crushing its fleet of EV1 electric cars in the early 2000s. I’m not a film critic, but if I were to make a movie about the demise of GM’s electric car program, I’d have lingered a bit long­er on the role of the EV1’s nickel-metal hydride batteries — how much they weighed, how long they lasted and, most of all, how much they cost at the time of GM’s alleged murder — but that’s just me.

As you might expect, the arrival of cars like the Tesla Roadster has prompted Paine to shoot a follow-up, due out this month, titled Revenge of the Electric Car. I’m here to see what Paine thinks about the Leaf, a cayenne-red bundle of EV1 wish fulfillment.

Based on how it looks (sort of like a Nissan Versa), you wouldn’t expect much from the Leaf driving experience, but in terms of hushed, silky smoothness, this thing drives like a mini Rolls-Royce. I’m not just indulging in hyperbole here. Rolls goes to extravagant lengths to disguise the fact that there are pistons smashing up and down under the hood. The Leaf doesn’t have to, since an electric motor is inherently quiet and vibration-free. And since the low-slung battery pack drops the car’s center of gravity, the Leaf is actually fun to hustle on a canyon road. I’m not going to say it’s as entertaining as a Mustang GT500, but it bodes well for future electric performance cars like the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG E-Cell.

When I pull into the driveway of Paine’s house, I find the garage of a man possessed. A Tesla Roadster sits beside a 2002 electric Toyota RAV4 EV. In the corner: an electric lawn mower. The roof is covered in solar panels. Paine emerges to check out the Leaf, which he has on order in the same color. He’s also buying a Chevy Volt.

Paine has to head across town, so I toss him the key and climb into the passenger seat. We pull out into traffic, and he lead-foots it, laying a little rubber. The Leaf’s 0–60 time isn’t great — it makes the equivalent of only 107 horsepower — but thanks to the immediate 207 lb-ft of torque, its 0–40 will surprise you.
I ask Paine if he thought, when he released his movie, that he’d be tooling around in an electric Nissan five years later. “No, I didn’t,” he says. “In the activist community, it’s sometimes hard to believe that anything good can ever happen. But here we are.”

As we drive, Paine keeps remarking on the Leaf’s resolute normalcy. He seems in a state of mild disbelief that this thing exists, its slick mouselike shifter and keyless ignition a stark contrast to the rough edges and idiosyncrasies of his RAV4 EV and early-build Tesla. This is the electric car as mass-produced, prime-time player. For the early adopters, the Leaf’s unassuming polish might also provoke some melancholy — it represents the moment EVs went from an underdog cause to a mainstream part of American transportation. Paine got what he wanted. So now what?

That’s a good question, because this is just the beginning. This is the point in the electric-car chronology where you’re plugging in at garden-level hotel rooms and dusting everyone off the line at red lights just to prove that you can. To Paine, electric cars represent more than a pragmatic advance of technology — they revive the optimism, the futuristic potential that cars once held before they all became technologically homogeneous. “Electrics promise a re-sexification of the car,” Paine says. “The car can go back to being a dreamy thing.”

And the first Leaf owners are gonna live the dream. Just as long as they pack an extension cord.

—

This article originally appeared in the April 2011 issue of Men’s Journal.

Follow us on Twitter: @MensJournal and on Facebook