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Fighting for The Resistance, a fleet of six X-wing starfighter replicas hovers over the Nissan stand on display for all to see.

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The new Nissan LEAF has taken top honors at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) annual CES Unveiled ceremony, presented by the Consumer Technology Association.

Nissan

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With Thanksgiving over and our family out of the house, what could be a better way to celebrate the Black Friday tradition than flying off to Southern California for fun in the sun, and a trip to the LA Auto Show?

Various fleet managers had told us and those in the industry that this was as good as the Detroit show without the bad weather in January that comes with Michigan. So we got ourselves signed up for the Press Days at the show and headed off to the big city.

The press event is more than just an opportunity to see new vehicles and concepts that the manufactures have coming in the years ahead. They call it Auto Mobility, and the first two days are nothing but presentations on technologies that are coming to cars and what will make all of our lives better in the future. There was however no talk of flying cars as in ‘Back to the Future’, but electrification and many different apps to make everyone’s lives easier and cleaner were all the ‘buzz.’

How about a new idea from Hyundai that takes their vehicle connectivity platform called Blue Link one step further with the owners ok, it can be connect to businesses to allow access to the vehicle and provide its location for things like grocery delivery to the trunk, washing and detailing of the car where it is parked, even the delivery of one’s dry cleaning to the Hyundai.

These are companies that exist today and will be partnering with Hyundai to make these types of services available all while the owner is doing something else at the time. These services are of course, all controlled by the owners’ smart phone through the Blue Link app, as our lives get more complex and free time becomes a premium, the list of things that could be accomplished without actually having to go somewhere will continue to grow and grow.

We would expect over the next few years to see these types of things come with all new vehicles from any manufactures. As there was a point in the past where OnStar was all the rage with GM being the only vehicles to carry it. Now it seems everyone has some type of an OnStar like system with their vehicles.

There was also a lot of time devoted to the subject of electrification of vehicles and moving to a non-fossil based fuel system. Los Angeles wants to have no gas burning vehicles on the road in the city after 2028, quite a lofty goal. Things in California however are moving faster than elsewhere in the U.S. as now 5% of all vehicles in California that are sold are electrics.

Could this even be possible? With the right incentives and tax breaks they seem to think so in LA. Almost the entire bus system is now electric, and there are more and more places to charge electric vehicles. Now the fast charge stations are offering a 440 volt charge system that can get most charged in less than an hour.

But there were those proposing 880 volt and beyond charging systems, one gentlemen even suggested a 1 megawatt station that could charge a Tesla in just 10 minutes. I our humble opinion it will take charging times like this to get a buy in from the common public, that and vehicles that are priced in the region where most can afford them.

On that note we had a chance to drive the new 2018 Nissan Leaf at the show, the newest version of the all-electric vehicle. Nissan claims that it will now get up to 150 miles per charge, with a cost just a little north of $30,000. We had the discussion if that would work for us, and for the most part it would for Deanne who rarely drives more than 50 miles in a day.

We would venture a guess that for the most part, one vehicle in every family is in this same boat. With a price point like that and a car that looks that same as any other one on the road, it suddenly becomes a different decision in the buying process. Never visit a gas station again, that statement says it all! It would be most interesting to see how much power it actually took to charge at home during the night to get the real cost savings verses a petrol powered vehicle.

Electric cars are coming, if we want them or not, zero emission vehicles will become a part of everyday life as we know it in the nearer than most would think future. One of the great benefits we have discovered from driving a few different ‘all electric’ cars is the tremendous amount of power that is instantly available upon pressing the accelerator, that part is great. The lack of engine noise, well that takes some getting used to for sure!

Of course there were all kinds of other great reasons to attend the LA Auto Show, from the many vehicle launches to just getting reacquainted with old friends again, it was worth the effort to get there and participate. The industry like many others will undergo many changes in the future, and we think mostly for the betterment of all of us, in making our busy lives easier to deal with as the new technology becomes normal for us all.