A LEAF sighting in the Mile High City

leaf-cayenne2editors-blog-entry3I saw my first “free roaming”, non-Drive Electric Tour Nissan LEAF this evening at precisely 5:38 p.m. Mountain Standard Time here in Denver, Colo.

It was a Cayenne Red LEAF and it was zipping along, southbound, in the third lane of a heavily trafficked I-25 in far South Denver between the Yale and Hampden Ave. exits.

At first I wasn’t sure if I was seeing a real LEAF, but the distinctive long cat-eye tailights gave it away. This was no Nissan Versa. It was the full all-electric “Monty”.

Perhaps not such an exciting thing for Californians and folks on the West Coast, where the majority of the more than 10,000 LEAFs now sold — or leased — in the U.S. have landed.

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Cayenne Red LEAF
But here, on a beautiful, but also cold mid-February evening in which everything seemed to mimic the Cayenne Red of the LEAF thanks to another blazing orange Colorado sunset, any LEAF sighting is indeed exciting. Especially for an EV fanatic such as me, and especially for someone who would really like to have one of the very first LEAFs in Colorado but who, for complicated reasons I can’t reveal, won’t be sitting in one for at least 18 months, perhaps longer.

I wanted to zip up next to this brand new LEAF — which was still sporting plastic covered cardboard temporary license plates — and give the driver a thumbs up. But I was trapped in the right lane in my oh-so-outmoded 1992 Acura Integra only about one mile from my exit.

So, I had to be satisfied with a short glimpse of the future of driving zooming along in a sea of gas puffing cars, and, I’m thinking, without any recognition of its revolutionary status from 99% of the drivers on this cold, beautifully cayenne Colorado evening.

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