Select photos from the Continental Tire Sports Car Series Race and the PORSCHE 250 Race (Grand-Am Rolex Series) on Saturday at the Barber Motorsports Complex in Birmingham.

The Nissan Leaf Drive Electric Tour stopped in Franklin this weekend at Nissan’s North American headquarters. I signed up to drive some weeks ago and our group was the first to drive Saturday morning.

In short, the Leaf felt like any other small car.
It felt good. The Nissan Leaf feels just like any other small sedan on the market. And that’s a good thing. Actually, the car is quite a bit smoother and feels more solid than most. (The Chevy Aveo is a nightmare on the interstate). But all things considered, aside from the dashboard, there’s nothing else about the drive that tells you you’re steering an electric car.

The test drive lasted approximately two and a half miles including some interstate time. Acceleration was excellent. I had no trouble getting up to interstate speeds (70mph).

Range Indicator needs work The only thing that really bothered me was the range indicator. The car indicated 103 miles in available range when we left, yet after returning 2.5 miles later, the car indicated 78 miles available. I’m sure the range algorithm is to blame. Even our tour guide said it was just recently updated to factor in hills. And granted, it was a cold morning (low 40s) with interstate driving and heat blasting. That would take some time to get used to. I wonder if it wouldn’t be more acceptable as a simple full/empty gauge rather than trying to indicate range down to individual miles. Even most gas cars don’t try to do this.

A Different Driving Interface The gear shifter was another oddity where Nissan is trying something different. The car can be in park, drive or eco drive. But it’s not your standard shifter. To shift from park to drive, the “shifter” is more of a nob that you drag in a “C” shape, then the nob retracts to it’s original position. The car is placed back in park by pressing the “P” button located in the middle of the shifter nob. That’s all fine once you get used to it, but if Nissan really wants to get people into electric cars, giving them unfamiliar controls seems to take away from the goal. It’s just one more excuse for someone not to buy.

Reverse and Neutral were not readily obvious. I was so curious with Drive and Park that I didn’t even think to ask about those other two.

This photo from Nissan is actually a bit different from the actual model I drove.

Minimal Maintenance, Awesome Accessories With an electric car you do away with oil changes, radiator fluid (and leaks) and lots of other little sub-mechanics like fuel pumps, water pumps and thousands of moving parts that make up a gasoline engine that inevitably need to be serviced and maintained.

You can basically control the Leaf from your phone. The car can notify you if you forget to pug it in at night. You always know where the closest charging station is, and here’s the interesting part, Nissan can tell you if someone is using a specific charger. This is huge because this means Nissan knows when, where and how much electricity each car is acquiring (and spending). The data Nissan is collecting is impressive. I assume they’ll use it to learn the habits of drivers and to make improvements over time.

I’d Buy One If I had an extra $32K hanging out, I’d absolutely buy a Leaf. I’d be paying an early adoper fee at this point, but that’s okay with me. My commute length (30 miles round-trip) is ideal. Even with our current cars, we rent when taking long trips, so no change there. The Leaf has a funky look, but it could look twice as weird and still not matter as long as I never had to pull up to a gas pump again.

All in all, the Nissan Leaf feels like a great car. The issues described above are just nitpicks which I would love to have the chance to get used to. Hey Nissan, can I barter some design work in exchange for a Leaf? I think that’s fair.

Sorry for the lack of photos this time. We arrived so early, our group was ushered through with zero waiting and I never had time to even pull out my phone. Nissan also didn’t have the “Win a Nissan Leaf Booth” manned, so unfortunately, I won’t be winning a Leaf. :)

Here are a few photos from the Leaf tour from last year:

Normally I swap between two different batteries when using my MacBook Pro. Today I opened a drawer to my desk to fetch one of the batteries and found a bulging surprise waiting for me. From the photos below you can see the results of some type of internal reaction.

Luckily, the reaction wasn’t enough to burst the battery or start a fire. Thankfully, the battery wasn’t in my laptop at the time.

It only took about 2” of snow to turn a 30 minute afternoon commute into 2, 3, 4 or more hours. I spent 2 hours in the car after leaving the offive at 8:30 last night. Merredith spent over 4 hours trying to get home.

Nashville snow at I-65 near Armory Wednesday Afternoon

Nashville snow at I-440 near 21st Ave Wednesday Afternoon

Snow and traffic on Murfreesboro Road entering the airport tunnel

Snow on I-24 Wednesday night around 10:00pm

Snow in LaVergne Thursday Morning

Compilation of video and still images taken at this year’s Rolex Series race at Daytona.

We ended up with 2 inches in the La Vergne area. Definitely a good snow for Middle Tennessee. Here’s some HD footage from around 7:00 this morning.

Roads were still bad this morning, despite looking clear. The Tennessee Traffic Camera Widget caught this accident.

Tennessee Traffic Widget v2.0 has been released. On the front-end, this new version restores Memphis and Knoxville camera images to the widget.

On the back-end, this version of the widget is a complete rewrite. The city and camera list is now dynamically generated each time the widget is accessed. This will result in much faster update times on the periodic occasion that camera image URLs change.

Visit the Tennessee Traffic Widget site to download the new version.

It was amusing catching this guy out of the corner of my eye while driving home last night. The neighbors got some good height on this rather tall snowman.

Tall snowman

Lots of people seem to be doing a 2010 reflection post of some sort, so I wanted to jump in as well. To be a little different I thought I would reflect on what I learned this year. In no particular order: 6 Things I Learned in 2010

1. ActionScript 3.
Finally got a decent grasp on AS3 after several years hacking around with AS2. Some basic AS3 skills went into our Flash based Cornhole game this year. Be sure to throw a few bags in your off time.

2. CakePHP.
I never took any programming classes in school, but have spent the last few years really trying my best to teach myself basic scripting/programming skills in some of the most relevant web related languages. I’ve been playing with PHP for a while (CandorGallery) but really got into CakePHP this past year. CakePHP is a MVC based PHP framework that really lets developers do some powerful stuff. I built a little proof-of-concept webapp that imported trending topics from Twitter and let users rank the worthiness of the trends. I’ve since decommissioned that project.

3. jQuery.
I jumped into a tiny bit of Javascript a few years ago when working on the Tennessee Traffic Widget, but could never make my ideas actually function. This year I finally got into jQuery which has been an amazing tool for actually getting stuff done. I really cut my teeth on jQuery when building Pulse, which is a little app that accepts your zip code and displays current information based on that location, pulling in current tweets, weather, weather maps, news from Google News and photos from Flickr. This one was fun to work on.

4. Gardening.
Not just gardening, but learning about how this country grows/manufactures food and then gets it to the population has been a huge wake-up for me this past year. From chickens that are too fat to move, to patented seeds, to grain fed vs. grass fed animals, and on and on and on; It’s really quite disgusting how we feed ourselves. On the other side of that, participating in vegetable and meat CSA programs has been wonderful. Our backyard gardening project didn’t work out very well this year, so I’m looking forward to improving this coming spring.

5. Tinkering.
It’s amazing what you learn just from playing around with what interests you. This year I tinkered with an Arduino, built a squarefoot garden, scripted my home server to alert us to tornados and severe weather, rigged a solar panel and battery to run my home router and modem, built a small iPod charger out of yard lights, pulled down weather maps off NOAA radio and on and on picking up all kinds of information about how things work.

6. People.
I learned that people’s behavior is always unpredictable. After the historic flooding in Nashville this spring, most of our office spent time over several weeks helping people out who had homes that were flooded by the high waters. We ripped out drywall, carried belongings to higher ground, cooked food, etc., etc. People were grateful for the assistance, but at the same time we witnessed an interesting behavior pattern of people who were really unwilling to help themselves. There were several instances where people were content to sit and do nothing, leaving their belongings in their homes to rot, and live in unlivable conditions until someone offered physical help. And not just days after the flood, but weeks later. Three and four weeks after the water receded we were still out there with Hands on Nashville helping people that finally decided they probably shouldn’t live in waterlogged, moldy homes. I don’t know if it was pride or fear or just lack of common sense in some cases, but had there not been an overflow of volunteers in that area of town, there would still be people living in flood damaged homes, untouched and unrepaired. And it wouldn’t surprise me if there are still people living in those conditions, content not to help themselves out.

It was a stark contrast to the experience after Hurricane Andrew where all our neighbors came together immediately to secure belongings and damaged property and then come together each night to cook-out and provide food for each family on our cul-de-sac until power was restored and homes repaired. All without outside help from strangers.

Looking Ahead
On a brighter note, looking toward 2011, I’m looking forward to the continue rise of the electric vehicle, multi-touch workstations, iPad v2.0 with retina display and GPS at half the cost (fingers crossed), releasing a version of Seedling (web app for logging progress of plants in your garden), and continued learning and tinkering!

A quick photo of shadows in the snow from last night’s snowfall. It’s cold in Nashville. 16° currently at the house. Our coldest start to December since the 1940’s according to NWS.