It’s two weeks to the day now since I went down to the O2 Arena to pick up a Nissan LEAF so I could take part in the Big Turn On campaign to promote and perhaps even win a Nissan LEAF.
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| I have to take the parcel shelf out in my old car to get this in |
Initially I very much saw it as a bit of fun, I didn’t think an electric car would be suitable for our lifestyle or the size of our family. But after two weeks of hard use, I’ve been proved completely wrong. The Nissan LEAF is a completely practical family car for us. It takes the shopping, all 3 kids, a big pram and does our day to day travel without a single issue that you might expect (range/recharging are all suitable for our lifestyle).
So over the course of the two week test drive, my view has changed a lot. I’m not looking at the LEAF as a nice two weeks of novel travel, I’m looking at the LEAF as a sensible and practical form of transport for our family. And yes, it would be nice to win it.
Winning the LEAF is based on a voting system, the idea being us bloggers promote the brand via blog posts, twitter and other (social) media that share our experiences. I’ve done a few, they’re summarised here.
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| Infammy! |
As you may have spotted I even made it into the local paper this week! Unfortunately, as 45,000 newspapers hit the doormat, the website address on the Big Turn On site for me, the link that was in those 45,000 newspapers, with a readership of almost 70,000 people, changed at 5pm, giving an error to anyone that tried to see what was going on. Whilst clicks to the erroring page are going to be honoured as votes, no word of mouth that might have been generated by those lost visits will occur.
If I wasn’t so incredibly manly, I could have cried at that cruel blow. I’d briefly taken the lead but when the link went dead at 5pm, that lead was quickly overturned, returning to almost exactly what it had been at the start of the day. Cry or make the Lego that the boy was demanding I make (and the Kre-o Transformer, and that’s another story*) but in the end I disappeared off to our Book Group, got a good nights sleep and decided to put the many obstacles behind me and roll up my sleeves.
I’m sure the gremlins will get ironed out of the IT, perhaps it was just Friday 13th coming a day early. The funny thing is, the LEAF is being picked up on Tuesday and I’m actually going to miss it. The near silent, gliding grace of a practical family car has really transformed my life over the last two weeks!
I’m in a competition as part of the Big Turn On to win a Nissan LEAF, you can read about it and vote for me (if you want to) here.
*it’s not a Transformer if you have to completely disassemble the model and rebuild it to change it from a robot to a car is it???