How many people plunked down $99 to register for a Nissan Leaf? According to an email from Nissan, “As of this morning, 6,635 customers signed up to reserve a Nissan Leaf.” The reservation line has only been open about 70 hours (Nissan began taking reservations late Tuesday), so that’s a pretty solid rate of ~100 an hour.
Katherine Zachary, who handles PR for Nissan North America, told Autoblog that during the first three hours, 2,700 people registered for the Leaf, and that it’s been a steady flow ever since. However, if you were one of the people with an itchy trigger finger Tuesday, don’t count on getting your Leaf first. Nissan is looking at where the most demand to help determine where to roll out the vehicles. So far, Zachary said, 75 percent of the people registering for a Leaf are from the areas Nissan has targeted as early markets – places like Tennessee, Oregon, San Diego, Seattle and the Phoenix/Tucson region in Arizona. “Through the work we have been going and what those markets have been doing, people are ready,” Zachary said. Most of the reservations are from California, but a “fair amount” are from Georgia, due in part to the extra state incentives for plug-in vehicles there.
So far, the upper SL trim is beating the SV base trim level three to one. This makes sense to us, since the extra $940 does get you quite a few nice features. As for there being any cancellations yet, Zachary said she hasn’t heard of any at this point. Someone will be the first, but apparently no one wants to do so quite yet. Nissan will continue to issue periodic statements on the number of reservations as time goes by. We’ll be ready.
