A Nissan spokesman said Leaf customers were not expected to be frequent users of fast-charging stations and the battery should be capable of performing efficiently for at least 10 years.

The Lex Autolease report, Next Generation Fleets: Is the Future Electric?, says the Plugged-in Places scheme will not be completed until 2015 and only then would sales take off in significant numbers. At that point, the UK will have 11,000 charging points nationwide.

Other markets are taking up alternative solutions to range and infrastructure problems, with Renault setting up a Quickdrop battery exchange network in Israel and Denmark.

Here, a spent battery is exchanged for a fully-charged one, with the replacement taking a couple of minutes to fit rather than the hours needed for a plug-in charge.

However, Renault has no immediate plans to set up a similar system in the UK, and it would also be dependent on adopting Renault’s preferred vehicle purchase/battery lease scheme, which has been dismissed as unworkable for setting residual values by CAP.

Koskas pointed out that leasing the battery separately from the vehicle gives customers greater peace of mind over faults.

Renault estimates that 10% of the new car market by 2020 could be made up of battery EVs, but by then hydrogen fuel cell technology could offer comparable running costs with conventional powertrains.

According to General Motors, the additional cost of hydrogen fuel cell technology in 2015 – when the technology would be ready for commercial introduction – would be about £6,000 per equivalent vehicle, but by 2022 it believes this premium could
be eliminated.

Depending on a refuelling infrastructure, this could then give fleets access to zero-emission vehicles with a range equivalent to that offered by a current petrol car.

However, according to Dr Lars-Peter Thiesen, manager of hydrogen and fuel cell deployment strategy at Opel, similar incentives to the ones currently being offered for electric vehicles would be needed to encourage take-up.