And baby makes three

The first affordable EV with more than 200 miles (320 km) of range was, oddly enough, GM's Bolt.  GM beat Tesla to the market with an affordable, long-range EV by several months though, frankly, one wonders whether GM would have bothered if Tesla hadn't shown just how sexy EVs could be with their Model S.  And how well the Model S sold.  And how many people (>400,000) put down $1000 to reserve their Model 3.

But the first real mass market EV was the Nissan Leaf, first put on sale in December 2010.  It only had a 84 mile range from a 24 kWh battery pack.  Nissan had to compromise because battery costs were so high that to make a car ordinary people could afford, you had to have a short range.  Tesla decided instead to build a supercar (the Tesla Roadster), with a long range, and then the luxurious but pricey Model S, so that the cost of the batteries wasn't a factor.

Most car trips are relatively short.  The daily work commute, the weekly supermarket run.  But car buyers still wanted the option to drive long distances, and without a wide supercharger network, that was difficult.  Your longest daily journey with a Leaf would be 84 miles before you had to recharge, and without supercharging, that would take 12 hours.  A leisurely holiday perhaps, drifting from one town to the next, but certainly not a quick long weekend away.

Even so, the Nissan Leaf has been the best selling EV ever.

Source

The new Leaf has a 150 mile (240 km) range, with the option next year of a bigger battery pack with over 200 miles range.  There are a whole heap of new electric features including some autodrive apps like automated parking, gap maintenance on the freeway, etc.  And yet at under $30,000 before incentives, it will be $700 cheaper than  the previous model.  See Green Car Reports' article here, and Inside EVs' here.

The new Nissan Leaf is the third EV with reasonable range at a reasonable cost out this year.  Cost is no longer a major impediment to EV sales.  EVs are very cheap to run, because electric motors are 4 to 5 times as efficient as petrol engines, and maintenance expenses are far lower than with petrol engines because electric engines are so much simpler.  On a five year lease, the new Nissan would cost $199 a month, with monthly expenditures of "fuel" and maintenance 75% lower than a comparable petrol-driven ICEV.

The problem now for most EVs is the supercharger network.  The new Leaf takes 16 hours to charge in your garage, but will recharge to 80% in 40 minutes with a supercharger.  For Nissan, the trouble is that the only company with a decent supercharger network is Tesla.  Tesla has offered to share its network (for a price) but will the company be keen to have its own supercharger network clogged with the cars of competitors, especially as Model 3 production ramps up?  It can be done: Tesla could allow Leafs to recharge at Tesla stations with the proviso that Nissan rapidly builds its own network of superchargers which Tesla customers could also use.  This would double the supercharger network to the benefit of both companies and their customers.  We shall see: the key constraint now on increasing EV sales is no longer price, and presumably car makers serious about EVs know this.

I remain convinced that 2018 is the flexion point in the S-curve for EV adoption.