Exactly 10 years last week, Jeffrey Kaffee of New Jersey got the keys to the very first Chevrolet Volt sold. The handover came just four days after Olivier Chalouhi took delivery in San Francisco of the very first Nissan Leaf sold in the U.S.
The Volt had an EPA-rated electric range of 35 miles, and the Leaf’s all-electric range was only a bit more than twice that: 73 miles. But the Volt was marketed as a “range-extended electric car,” just as hard to understand back then as the idea of a plug-in hybrid—and the Leaf was distinctly odd-looking. Still, no matter how compromised, they represented the cutting edge of automotive technology at the time.
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