2017 BMW I3 vs Nissan LEAF

What's the difference?

The i3 is actually reasonably priced for what it is; a compact, stylish, unusual BMW product. Unfortunately, the pure electric car will be, for the foreseeable future, hamstrung by the lack of infrastructure... and a lack of interest at both a government and a corporate business level in providing said infrastructure.

The i3, unfortunately, will end up being an auto curio of the decade. Those who own one and get the best use out of it will absolutely love its style, the normalcy of the driving experience, the handling, and the practicality, but for everyone else, it's still two steps away from being a viable alternative to a fuel-powered machine.

The Leaf is a long way from reaching our shores, probably late 2018. Australia just isn't a big market for the Leaf and in Japan alone the first month of sales has yielded 9000 orders, which is a cracking start by any measure.

The new Leaf is way better than the old car - it's stiffer, even quieter and has a far better range. Only problem is, we're a long way from seeing it and its likely $50,000 (or thereabouts) price tag is possibly a bridge too far for Australians.

This is the first second-generation mass-produced electric car, putting Nissan ahead of the game. With 3.5 billion kilometres covered by the first generation, that's a lot of data for Nissan to have consumed and learnt from. And they have.

The hatchback-sized BMW is an... interesting looking car. It's relatively conservative in its shape, but get closer to the car and you realise you're looking at something quite unusual.

The devil is in the detail; the wheels are quite concept car-like, and the regenerative brake arrangement is visible through the spokes. There's also a smattering of 'look at me' electric blue to announce the car's intentions.

BMW has straddled the line perfectly between having something that's interesting and something that won't scare the straights.

It's aged pretty well in the couple of years it's been on sale, too. There was a real danger that BMW could have overemphasised the car's unusual nature; look at Toyota's fuel cell Mirai, for example.

The i3 is sufficiently different to attract the eye, but it's not so unusual that it makes it uncomfortable or awkward to drive - or to be seen in. BMW has straddled the line perfectly between having something that's interesting and something that won't scare the straights.

Let's be honest, the first Leaf wasn't a gorgeous car and neither is the second. It's mercifully less blobby than the older car which reminded me of a humpback whale, and more conventional-looking all-round. It could pass as a kind of Pulsar facelift.

Or it would if it wasn't bristling with details that mark it out as an EV. Blue flashes abound being the colour of choice for carmakers across the world to denote...er...green cars. The optional two-tone paint is quite effective. It's got a clear "shaped by aero" look about it, which is sensible as every little bit helps.

Inside could be mistaken, again, for one of the marque's less advanced machines. That's bound to be deliberate to both keep costs down and to make the car more appealing to a wider range of buyers.

What is impressive is the new media system and the way it integrates properly into the dash. Materials are variable, with some hard plastics here and there, but the stuff you touch the most is pretty good.

The bluff shape of the i3 lends itself to being quite roomy. There is quite a lot of headroom and sufficient leg and foot room for rear seat passengers, while an almost complete absence of a transmission tunnel gives the rear seat passengers an extra measure of space.

It's strictly a four-person car only. There are cup holders for the rear in the middle of the rear seats, and there are two cup holders line astern in the front of the car.

BMW is rightly proud of the alternate materials that are used in the BMW i3.

Again, the lack of a traditional transmission means there's a great deal of space for both driver and passenger, but the door sills of the carbon fibre reinforced plastic safety cell are very high when getting in and out of the car.

BMW is rightly proud of the alternate materials that are used in the BMW i3. The dash, for example, is made of a recycled natural fibre, but unfortunately, it ends up looking like the underside of a luggage cover in a cheaper car.

It's easy to see what BMW is doing, but in this instance - and particularly in contrast with the eucalyptus wood dash laminates - it just doesn't ring true. Luckily, other material finishes can be optioned to bring it into line with the rest of the cabin.

Probably the most unusual element of driving the i3 is the jog-shuttle style gear shift. Once you get your head around the idea that you twist your hand towards the driver to engage D and away to engage reverse, it's actually quite easy.

The steering wheel spoke, however, can hide the start/stop button and the awkwardly placed parking mode button. If you're not familiar with the car, it can be confusing.

The rest of the switch gear is familiar territory for BMW, and features a three mode drive select switch featuring Comfort (or normal), Eco Pro (which accentuates efficient driving) and Eco Pro+, which strives for maximum range by turning off climate control and limiting the car to 90km/h.

With a large glasshouse, the i3 is supremely easy to look out of, with large three-quarter glass and good visibility out of the smallish rear window.

The view through the steering wheel lands on a narrow, tablet-style instrument screen.

No visibility issues with the system and all its vital information, including a digital speedo, range, percentage of battery life left, how many kilowatts per hour, or kilowatt hours for 100 kilometres, you're using. It's a weird way to measure economy, but that's what you get when you run a proper EV.

There are two ISOFIX baby seat mounts in the back, and the rear seats do flip down to give you more cargo room, although the floor of the cargo area is raised quite high thanks to the electric motor in the rear of the car.

There is 260 litres of luggage space on offer with the seats up, and a practical and useful 1100 litres with the seats down.

When it comes to practicality of use, the EV has a fatal flaw – it's relatively inflexible. For example, I wanted to do a 90-minute round-trip before our photo shoot with the i3.

Vehicle charging infrastructure in Australia is in its absolute infancy, despite the decade that electric cars have been on sale.

If I had taken the i3, I would have depleted the battery to the point where we wouldn't get to our shoot, and there was no time to recharge between tasks. Result? I had to take another car.

This is the reality of an electric car owner's life in a nutshell. If you have a fixed route, say between home and work, and you can access a reasonably fast charging system, then the i3  - and all electric cars - work spectacularly well.

However, vehicle charging infrastructure in Australia is in its absolute infancy, despite the decade that electric cars have been on sale. In my hometown of 400,000 people, there are less than five commercial chargers, and not all of them work on any given day.

Like any conventional hatchback, you'll be perfectly happy in the Leaf as long as you're up front or not too tall. The driving position is probably the only sticking point in the new Leaf. As with its predecessor, it's missing reach adjustable steering. As you sit a little high due to the thicker-than-usual floor (the batteries are under there), that's going to be an issue for taller drivers.

Apart from that, it's got the usual lofty roof, a back seat you could put three kids across and cupholders front and rear for a total of four. The boot will swallow 435 litres of stuff, although if we have a space-saver spare, it might take a dive. As it is, the boot is deep and could probably do with a false floor to stop you from having to bend down to place or retrieve things.

Australia is a small market, so we're some way off from actual pricing. Nissan execs have been promising other markets pricing that is basically flat - that would mean, hopefully, a price below $50,000.

Basic spec looks like being 16-inch alloys, cloth trim with blue stitching, six speaker stereo with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, sat nav, reversing camera, front and rear parking sensors, auto LED headlights and a space saver spare (the Japanese spec cars didn't have a spare).

The Nissan stereo head unit is only a small unit, at 5.0 inches.

ProPilot semi-autonomous highway and parking functionality and the nifty rear vision mirror which is actually a screen fed by a rear-facing camera are both likely to be an option.

The Nissan stereo head unit is thankfully better, but more importantly, it has those aforementioned smartphone mirroring plug-ins. Expect more of this in other Nissans, too - a well-placed executive I spoke with was mystified as to why it wasn't already in everything Nissan could fit it to, and promised more to come. Sadly the screen is only a small unit, at 5.0 inches.

A liquid-cooled 360V electric motor (which is also used in the i8 sports car) resides under the boot of the i3, revs to 11,400rpm and produces all of its torque output of 250Nm in full from rest, before tapering off at about 6000rpm. Its power figure of 125kW peaks at around the same value.

It's directed through the rear wheel via a fixed-ratio single speed transmission.

The new Leaf's battery and motor are big step forward. The battery capacity has jumped to 40kWh, with range up to a claimed 400km on Japanese cycle figures. Power is up from 80kW to 110kW and torque is also up to a healthy 320Nm, a rise of 24 per cent.

Power goes to the front wheels via a single-speed transmission.

This particular test of the i3 was designed around the idea of the longer commute of 75km over varied terrain. In that guise, it is surprisingly practical, capably allowing me to cover the 150km round trip with an indicated 20 to 25km of charge to spare.

This equated to a dash-indicated average of 12.9kWh/100km, not far from the claimed 12.6 figure supplied by BMW.

The route includes about 400m of elevation change and about 40km of freeway, with the balance being urban and suburban roads, while I tried to drive each of the six journeys as I would in a petrol car.

However, if I were to stray from the parameters of that commute, then it's not so practical.

DC charging is not common, but it's nice to know that the car is ready for it.

Charging the i3's batteries from a regular 10amp home socket takes 14 hours to charge the car to just 80 per cent - which is simply too long. Adding BMW's Wallbox to your house lowers that time to eight hours.

Public chargers with a higher rating can reduce that time, again charging to 80 per cent, to four hours.

The i3 also has built-in DC charging ability, which increases the rate at which power can flow into the batteries by a factor of seven, reducing 80 per cent charge time to about 40 minutes. DC charging is not common, but it's nice to know that the car is ready for it.

It's a simple procedure to plug the recharger in, and the i3 lights up around the recharging port to tell you what state the charge is at.

Of course, you can simply pull into any brand of service station in a combustion engine car, and refuel your car much more quickly and conveniently.

BMW, along with other electric and electric hybrid manufacturers like Audi and Mercedes-Benz, has long lobbied the Australian government for assistance and for a way forward for electric cars, but the pleas are falling on the deaf ears of a constantly rotating government.

Obviously fuel consumption is a big fat zero, but the range is what you want to know about. We covered a range of road types and speeds and the range looked to be a fairly reasonable 280-350km depending on how much stick you apply.

Charging on a domestic plug will take around 16 hours at 3kW and 8 hours at 6kW. On the day before our drive, Nissan showed us a working concept of a drive-over mat for inductive charging, which means no plugs or wires and an easy drive up, switch off and charge experience. It's a few years away, however.

The trick with any alternative style of vehicle is to make it as normal as possible to live with, and the i3 achieves that for the most part. The shifter is unusual, granted, and the strong regenerative braking effect – where the car slows by up to 80 per cent by just coming off the accelerator - can be quite off-putting for a new EV driver.

On the whole, the i3's biggest trick is the instant response from the electric engine. There is 150kW and 250Nm of torque, and they're both all available all the time. There are few other city runabouts that can come quite close to its level of pace in an urban environment.

The carbon fibre reinforced plastic chassis is built like a safety cell.

Once you're used to the braking, too, it's hard to go back. Simply lifting off the throttle brings the speed of the car down quickly, and you just apply the brakes right at the end of the stop to prevent the car from rolling any further.

The carbon fibre reinforced plastic chassis is built like a safety cell, and its suspension components are mounted to the very stiff structure. You can actually feel the articulation of the individual suspension components at each corner.

The ride, though, can be fidgety at times. We put that down to BMW's choice of tyres, the weight of which detracts from the ride. There is no space for a spare tyre of any sort, either.

Like all electric cars, the Leaf is fun even if it isn't meant to be. Nissan's global PR machine have spent the best part of the last month or so talking up the Leaf's driving appeal so expectations were high. They were further jacked up by the NISMO Leaf Concept on the Tokyo Motor Show stand a couple of days before we drove the standard car.

As always, the way an EV drives is quite striking. The step off from standstill is addictive - the Leaf is the strong and silent type, the the dash to city speeds dispatched with vigour. The run to 100km/h is well under ten seconds, too, so while it's not a rocket, it's not a slouch either.

New to the Nissan is one pedal operation or what the Japanese company calls ePedal. It's switchable (and best used in town) and differs from a similar system on the BMW i3 by not just using the drag of the electric motor when you lift off the throttle, but also lightly applies the brakes. The idea you would rarely need the brake pedal was easy to swallow and proved to be absolutely true. It does make the car fun to dart around in but also relaxing, which isn't a bad trick.

But fun in the traditional sense? Not really. While we didn't point it down a bendy road, the very light steering is unlikely to win it any fans. Grip seemed good, though and it doesn't feel heavy like some electric cars do (yes, Tesla).

Key to an electric car is the range. Nissan claims 400km which is as believable as a fuel figure sticker, but subject to the same rational thinking as those stickers. Our limited run from Nissan's HQ in Yokohama on a short-ish loop (which did involved some less than sympathetic use of the ePedal) and a sprint along a freeway saw us return with still 228km range left. While that sounds a bit weak, it does mean that normal driving should yield around 350km in the real world, which isn't terrible.

Another of Nissan's favourite features is ProPilot. Billed as semi-autonomous driving, that's probably a bit of a stretch. It worked well enough, keeping to a speed, keeping to a lane, and braking for slow cars in front - but it's really just a cleverer active cruise control.

ProPilot Park is also nothing we haven't seen before but, my goodness, it's slow. If you park as slowly as the Leaf parks itself, someone will probably get out of the car behind and clock you one. Thankfully, Nissan's European team is going to speed things up to what we expect from, say, a Golf. 

The Leaf will leave the Oppama and Sunderland plants with at least six airbags, ABS, stability and traction controls. Also available is AEB and rear cross-traffic alert as well as the ProPilot semi-autonomous driving that adds lane-keeping and blind spot monitoring. Two ISOFIX attachment points are expected.

The i3 is covered for three years and unlimited kilometres, while the battery array warranty runs to three years or 100,000km.

The i3's consumables are minimal; even the brake pads will last longer, thanks to the regenerative braking system.

Service intervals are suggested every two years or 25,000km, and prices are determined on a needs basis.

That said, the i3's consumables are minimal; even the brake pads will last longer, thanks to the regenerative braking system.

It's likely the Leaf will be covered by the usual Nissan warranty but further to that, Nissan has nothing yet to offer, which is understandable given how long it will be before the car arrives. It is expected Nissan will carry over its existing eight-year/160,000km battery warranty.