Smooth Radio DJ Mark Goodier was the first ever Nissan LEAF owner in the UK
"As a radio DJ, Mark Goodier has mixed with the great and the good of the pop world. With an illustrious career that took in 15 years at BBC Radio 1 and now sees him presenting every weekday on Smooth Radio, Goodier has rubbed shoulders with the likes of George Michael, Annie Lennox, Kurt Cobain and just about anyone you can think of in the music industry.
But in March this year Goodier put himself firmly in the history books for something altogether different by becoming the first ever UK owner of the game-changing Nissan LEAF electric car.
We grabbed ‘5 minutes with’ Mark over the mobile airwaves as he drove to his gym, and pressed him on what he thinks of the car, what it’s like to live with and, most importantly, who the LEAF would be if it were a recording artist. Read on…
TCP: Have you owned electric cars before the LEAF?
MG: Yes, I had the Ford TH!NK when it came out on a lease from Ford. I think it was probably around 2000 when that came out, so it’s about 10 years that I’ve been driving electrics. We had about four years with that car before Ford scrapped the programme and took them back and wouldn’t sell them to us.
It was at that time that I vowed never to buy a Ford again. I phoned up the guy who ran the programme at Ford UK and said , ‘I love this car and I’ve used it for four years; can you sell it to me because it’s not worth anything to you.’ He said, ‘I agree with you, it’s worth nothing and we don’t won’t any of them in this country.’ I told him, ‘You’re going to make a customer very unhappy rather than keeping a customer happy,’ and he said, ‘Exactly right.’ So I decided to never buy a Ford again.
I bought one [a TH!NK] from Norway and shipped it on the ferry and we’ve nursed it along for the last five or six years. It’s still going. It’s a brilliant car, actually – a bit of a trail-blazer. But it’s nothing compared to the LEAF, I have to say.
Mark poses with his LEAF
TCP: So how does the LEAF compare to your first electric cars?
MG: Well, before the LEAF my wife and I were running the TH!NK and a G-Wiz, because we both go into central London every day. I was waiting for one of the main companies to start making electrics again, and I kept in touch with them almost as an obsession. Nissan were just the first big company to announce they had an electric car and I kept quite close to them until the thing was available for ordering and off we went.
I was fascinated when Nissan’s Francois Bancon [General Manager of Exploratory & Advance Product Department] described to me this vehicle four years ago as a ‘strategy correction’, which is the first time I’d heard a major company use a phrase like that.
But to answer your question – how the vehicle compares… in a way I feel sorry for the company that made the TH!NK originally because they sold to Ford with really good intentions then, as soon as Jacques Nasser left Ford [he was CEO until 2001] there was nobody who believed in it. It basically got killed just like all the other major car companies did with their electric vehicles at the time.
The TH!NK is a good little run-around, but the LEAF is a proper car. I had a couple of Mercs over the years; it reminds me in terms of how it drives and how smooth it is of driving a Merc.
TCP: Smooth Radio plays a lot of cool, chilled music. Does the LEAF fit the cool image?
MG: My son, who’s 17, thinks it’s the coolest car we’ve ever had, and he’s not easily impressed, put it that way. He loves cars and he’s interested in real petrol-head cars but I think this is such a well thought-out and designed vehicle that he was extremely impressed.
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I’m not such an idiot that I think everyone has to have an electric car. I think there are people for whom this would be a really good idea, and people for whom this would be impractical right now. But in the future there will be vehicles that can do 300 miles and people will be driving at 2p per mile rather than 10p per mile, and whichever way you look at it, that’s got to be pretty smart.
TCP: What sort of reaction do you get from people while out and about?
MG: If I was on a commission to sell this vehicle, I could’ve sold about a dozen by now. And that’s just with people I know.
Hardly anybody’s seen these vehicles so it does get a lot of looks, and it does look pretty good; it looks like a proper saloon car rather than a hairdryer. For what it is, it looks pretty good and people do ask about it a lot, and people are genuinely interested in it and want to find out what it can do.
TCP: Have you turned any heads in the celeb world with your purchase?
MG: Well, my good friend [BBC Radio 2 DJ] Johnnie Walker and I are gadget-heads and I had to show him this and he said, ‘I think you’ve finally trumped me this time’ – he was very, very impressed with it. And if you’re only really interested in future technology, it’s undeniably a great bit of kit.
TCP: If the LEAF were a recording artist, who would it be?
MG: I’d like to think it was somebody like one of my favourites, Prince. You know, because it’s kind of adventurous, it’s at the forefront, it’s a trail-blazer, it’s leading the field… and it’s pretty cool.
Mark in the Smooth Radio studio
TCP: What’s the longest distance you’ve driven in your LEAF? Any range anxiety yet?
MG: About 10 years ago I found out what range anxiety was when I ran out of juice on the TH!NK, and I had to get towed home by my wife, who was less than impressed.
But I’ve never let this [the LEAF] go below 18 miles [left to go] and I only have to charge this once or twice a week because I’m only doing about 20 miles a day. So, I’ve not had range anxiety in it.
When you drive an all-electric car you drive differently, so you don’t drive aggressively. It changes the characteristics of your driving, with lots of benefits; you become quite a courteous driver and you let people out, etc. because you’re not trying to get there and save 90 seconds. So I don’t boot it around and I do try very hard to maximize the range because that protects the battery life. And also we try not to charge the battery past 80% because the advice for really good long battery life is not to charge it to 100% all the time.
So I’m doing all the things that make sense. In a way we’re the ideal people to use this because if we do 150 miles a week, that’s quite a lot. So we never really run into problems with range.
The charging infrastructure for long distances is kinda on its way, but it’s not there yet. For example, my brother’s been ill so I was going to visit him on the south coast. I checked out where the fast charge was at the nearest dealer, and they have a machine but it’s not working yet. So I think there’s definitely a way to go before all these bits of infrastructure are right.
TCP: Are you a committed greenie or just a gadget freak?
MG: I’m really very interested in it, to the extent that we got British Gas to put 14 solar panels on the roof, and we’re progressively changing all of our lighting to LED instead of tungsten. But I’m not an obsessive greenie in as much as I think these things are practical and financial as well as ‘green’. So I’m doing my bit, but I’m not an eco bore, I don’t think… although others might think I’m a bit obsessive on electric vehicles.
If I’m really honest with you, the thing that started all this was financial. When the London congestion charge came in, they also announced that electric vehicles would be exempt. And then Westminster council said that if you’ve got an electric vehicle you can park for free in meters and pay-and-display, and you can park for a year for £75 or £100 in their Masterpark car parks. That just seemed so financially sensible to me, and I just didn’t see the need to drive a Merc into town every day when I could drive something more appropriate for the journey.
So I wouldn’t worry about me becoming more eco evangelist, and I don’t want to paint myself that way as I think that’d be stretching it.
TCP: You mention sporty cars there… did you not fancy picking up a Tesla Roadster?
MG: Do you know, I would love to get a Tesla. But the problem is that it’s £80,000… even at the height of my Radio 1 time, the most expensive car I owned was a pretty decent Merc at maybe £40,000. I’ve always had a slight worry, a discomfort with having a car sat in the road that is basically getting used for an hour a day that has cost you £80,000 or £100,000. If people can afford that and justify it then that’s fine, but I’ve always thought there must be better things to spend your money on than something that’s just going to lie in the road and look good.
Solar panels on Mark's roof generate enough electricity to charge both electric cars for free
Having said that, I haven’t driven the Tesla, and I would love to drive it. And you know the Nissan prototype they’ve got [the ESFLOW]…. Francois Bancon said that’d be a £30,000 car. If Nissan in five years have that as a £30,000 car and Tesla have the Roadster as £40,000 because they have to [in order to compete], and if they ramp up production, then maybe.
TCP: You’ve had solar panels fitted on your home – does that mean you can charge the LEAF for free?
MG: Yes, effectively it does. The maths on driving an electric car are enough to justify getting one, but when you add solar to the equation I think you’d have to be crazy not to, if your council allows it. And you have to have a south-facing roof, too. The solar we’ve got – 14 panels – is about a £14,000 install and it’s a 2.94 kWh installation. What that means is that, over a year, we’ll produce enough energy to charge the LEAF every day.
But, as I’ve already said, we only charge the LEAF twice a week and the TH!NK twice a week, so we’re producing way more electricity off the roof across the year, on average, than we need for the vehicles. So what we’re also doing is running the washing machines during the day rather than at night and shifting the use of our heavy electricity usage gadgets to when we’re generating. That we’re not drawing as much off the grid. So all the way round, we’re winning.
And when you add in the feed-in tariff [where excess energy can be sold back to the grid] it’ll probably be worth about £1,200 per year for 24 years, which means your break-even is in eight years. But during the summer the solar is probably going to mean we reduce our energy from the grid by 30%. So financially, you’re mad not to do it, really.
I do like the idea of being able to say our electric cars are as green as you can get. If you get down to the nitty-gritty of the energy involved in the manufacture of these things then that’s a different story, of course. But then a World Wildlife Fund report on electric cars says that they’re 75% efficient versus fossil fuel cars being about 20% efficient. It’s a really interesting report [read it here].
TCP: Do you listen to radio or ipod when you’re driving?
MG: Yes, the technology in this car is pretty good. It didn’t come with a DAB radio, which is possibly a little unhelpful as I work in the business and run a company that produces digital content for radio stations. But the radio, the nav and the integration of Bluetooth is really good, such that if I have something on the iPod or iPhone and I want to play it, it will play through the speakers in the car without me having to change a setting or anything – it just does it. It’s pretty good.
TCP: What’s your favourite driving music?
MG: The record I like right now is a Paul Simon album that comes out in about six weeks called So Beautiful or So What. It’s a very good record. I interviewed him about six weeks ago in Jersey and he’s a remarkable talent. The record is great.
TCP: The LEAF is obviously very ‘green’… what’s the least efficient vehicle you have ever owned?
MG: Well, we’ve got two electrics and a Volvo XC90, which we use twice a year to drive to Scotland. The reason we haven’t sold it is that it’s not worth that much, but it’s practically useful when you have to drive 400 miles from Glasgow to London. And that is not very green. But then it doesn’t get much use so it’s not polluting as much as if it were being used every day.
You can hear Mark Goodier on Smooth Radio 102.2 FM, or find him on Twitter @markgoodier
If you’re interested in the idea of solar panels, get in touch with British Gas by emailing them at evenquiries@britishgas.co.uk"
Em: http://www.thechargingpoint.com/2011/05 ... k-goodier/