Forget salad, what the people want are sports cars

JAWS to the floor: it’s the new Nissan Leaf. It’s an eco-friendly motor to save the environment and – if press reports are to be believed – the company’s Sunderland plant. And it’s about as exciting as lettuce.

If you’re going to save the world, at least follow Christopher Reeve’s example and do it in style, not with an electric hatchback which looks suspiciously like a Toyota Auris with larger headlights. Even the name’s unexciting; you’d want to spend a week taming a Mustang or a Celica, but calling a car Leaf makes me instantly think of salad.

Don’t get me wrong, going green is a great idea, but I wish car company executives would get it out of their head that anything with an electric engine, whether it’s got wheels or not, has to be classified as white goods. Why not stick the Leaf’s 90kw batteries into something smaller and sportier?

We British used to be brilliant at this sort of thing; the MG Midget and Lotus Elan might run on planet-killing petrol but they’re small and light enough to get around it, while looking and handling in a way which still embarrasses today’s hot hatches. They prove that small, friendly cars can still have a soul, a point lost with the Leaf.

Mazda’s MX-5 is the nearest modern equivalent but even Nissan has a history of making cars which are frugal and fun. You might dismiss the early ‘90s 100NX, pictured, as being a Sunny in a sequin dress but when you lift out the glass panels and turn it into a micro convertible, you won’t care. It’s also an acquired taste in the looks department but at least it gets an opinion, which is more than you say for the indifferent shrug you’ll give the Leaf in ten years’ time.

The small sports car thing is way overdue a revival, and there’s no better way to replace V8s with voltage. Stick the Leaf’s ‘leccy motor into the 100NX’s modern equivalent, and you’d have the perfect socially-minded sports car. You could even call it 150Z, to make it the 370Z’s smaller sister, give it some mini sports car styling, and it’d be jaw-dropping in a completely different way.

People get paid far more than I do for offering up ideas worse than this.