The electronic marketing by Nissan is an interesting point.
My understsanding is they emailed one of the members of Stretton Climate Care a Shropshire environmental group, offering a test drive. They took it up out of interest, not intending to buy and not aware of the progress made.
Less thana year later, they have a Leaf, been involved in the provision of public charging in 2 separate locations in the small town of Church Stretton, and held an awareness day that was supported by Kevin in his Roadster and many other ev's. This and other awareness days have led to others in the area buying plug in ev's. Arguably all from one email and test drive. The ripple effects can be significant.
As far as the tipping point....
Ten years ago on the yahoo email discussion list that was the equivalent of this I remember similar debates.
Some believed 100 mile ev's were never going to happen. Others believed the 500 mile affordable ev was just round the corner. All this lives on a server somewhere.
None of us anticipated that a major car maker Citroen would stop making ev's altogether for sale in the UK. And that effectively we would be left with conversions of ice cars or nothing.
Probably few if any anticipated the man involved in Paypal putting all his money into making ev's happen.
The future is what happens while we're making other plans, as John Lennon says.
Will be fascinating to see how as the switch starts to happen it will impact on the economies of ice cars.....economies of scale starting to fall away may increase the momentum to ev's
I personally believe it will be somewhere in the middle. But the tipping point is psychological as much as anything. And increasingly people who don't drive or consider ev's know about them. And many consider them the future. In that sense I think we are at the very least tipping towards the tipping point...m
