2011 Nissan Leaf
If you're on the U.S. waiting list for a 2011 Nissan Leaf, we certainly hope you already have a charging station already installed in your garage.
Bloomberg caught wind that some consumers are having their orders dropped temporarily until they install a plug-in charger at home and present the paperwork to prove it.
This will apparently exacerbate the already long wait times to get the new Nissan Leaf, which we named the GreenCarReports Best Car To Buy last year.
Marc Fishman of Burbank, California, has had his order delayed every month for the last four months. “My delivery date kept jumping around," he said, "from April to ‘pending’ to May to June to July.”
The short supply of Leafs, however, is not surprising. June is the month when the auto industry expected to be hit with a supply crunch after the major earthquake and tsunami in Japan last March.
The short supply issue is also business as usual for the brand-new and eagerly awaited category of electric cars, especially the all-electric 2011 Leaf. That car's sales doubled this month to 2,167 units, a drop in the bucket compared to the record 32,298 2011 Altimas sold just last March.
Nissan still has a long way to go to meet its goal of delivering 20,000 Leafs in the U.S. this year.
Meanwhile the company is struggling to meet the demand for Leafs in the seven U.S. States (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington) where people can actually place orders.
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