Paul Lamb stands in front of his Nissan Leaf, which he purchased on May 7. Lamb, a longtime Smyrna resident, is among the first in Rutherford County to own one of the new all-electric cars. / TAYLOR LOYAL/ SMYRNA A.M.
"SMYRNA — Paul Lamb got his first car in 1966 when he was stationed in the Air Force at Sewart Air Base. It was a 1956 Ford Crown Victoria that he bought for $20 and then painted orange with a brush.
“It looked good from a distance,” he said with a laugh.
As happy as he was about getting that car, Lamb was even more excited on May 6 when he became one of the first Rutherford County residents to get a Nissan Leaf. While his new car was built in Japan, the automaker’s all-electric vehicle and the batteries for it will be built in Smyrna starting next year. It’s something that Lamb, a longtime Smyrna resident, is proud to be a part of.
He was on a waiting list to get one of the Leafs for more than a year. And his car was one of the last to make it out of Japan before the country was hit with an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in March. He is one of 1,044 people who have purchased a Leaf since they went on sale in December, according to the most recent figures from Nissan.
Lamb is well aware of what the Leaf could mean to his community. The new Nissan Leaf battery plant here is expected to produced 200,000 batteries each year and the Nissan auto plant in Smyrna is expected to roll out 150,000 Leafs each year. Nissan anticipates creating some 1,300 jobs.
As Smyrna’s unemployment rate remains at 9.7 percent, those jobs are clearly needed. In April, an estimated 3,000 people showed up tothe Murfreesboro Career Center for a job fair for Yates Services, a maintenance contractor for the Nissan plant.
“Nissan makes good vehicles,” he said. “I never saw a hybrid that looked good to me, but I really liked the Leaf when I saw it.”
Now the chief instructor at Wings of Eagles School of Flight at the Smyrna Airport, Lamb works where Sewart Air Base, which closed in 1971, once was. The drive to his office from his Smyrna home is well within the Leaf’s 100-mile range. Even with running errands and attending meetings, Lamb figures he drives no more than 50 or
60 miles a day.
When he gets home, he plugs his Leaf into a charger he had installed in his garage. While he was told it would take eight hours for a full charge, his Leaf generally powers back up in about two hours. He expects the nightly charges to add $350 to $450 a year to his electric bill. With gas prices hovering near $4 a gallon, that’s not too bad, he said."
Em: http://www.dnj.com/article/20110518/MICRO0501/110518007