You wouldn’t easily confuse a Nissan Leaf with Santa Claus’s sleigh, but the two clearly have something in common: they can both be used to spread Christmas cheer.
Santa’s sleigh is used to transport presents to children all over the world. A Leaf, meanwhile, is being used to spread Christmas cheer at the Nissan plant in Sunderland where it’s built – by powering the lights on a 32-foot-tall Christmas tree.
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The tree is powered by energy drawn from the Leaf’s battery using its bi-directional charging function. That’s also known as Vehicle-to-Everything or V2X, although because it’s Christmas Nissan has named it V2X-Mas Tree. We thoroughly approve of that bad pun.
The Christmas tree display at the Sunderland plant isn’t only there to mark the festive season: it’s also to celebrate that the facility has now built 250,000 of the pioneering Leaf models.
Alan Johnson, the plant’s vice-president for manufacturing, described it as “a tremendous milestone” – that should be tree-mendous, surely? – and added: “It demonstrates the electric vehicle manufacturing expertise we have built up at our plant over the past decade.”
Nissan’s Sunderland plant looks to have a long future when it comes to producing EVs: it will house the firm’s EV36ZERO project, becoming a £1 billion EV manufacturing ‘ecosystem’. As part of that, a future small electric crossover will be produced there.
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