‘The EV is attractive in performance. You will feel this today please.” Reassuring pidgin English from Minoru Shinohara, Nissan’s senior vice-president, as he points through the window of the Oppama test facility, southwest of Tokyo, to where a little zebra-striped guinea pig car awaits me. EV stands for electric vehicle, and this is the latest version of what Nissan says we will be buying in the future. And not the distant future either. It’ll be on sale in 2010.

Having fallen behind domestic rivals such as Honda and Toyota in the green stakes (both firms have hybrids on sale in Britain), Nissan has decided to make EVs the focus of its eco-strategy by announcing that it will be the first manufacturer to mass-produce a fully electric horseless carriage.

Regardless of whether you treat cars as objects of obsession or objects for reaching Somerfield when it’s raining, everyone has an opinion on their environmental impact. Undoubtedly the green issue is complicated: biofuels are a great idea as long as you don’t treble the cost of bread or chop down gibbons’ habitats in the process of producing them. I myself am a waste-vegetable-oil disciple and feed my Mercedes-Benz 300D on it. And I still cannot understand why so many people treat LPG as if it were witchcraft.

Hybrid cars offer the chance to be quiet and emissions-free in cities, then to drive faster on the motorways, charging up your batteries in the process. The range on offer would score a C at school (not bad, but not brilliant) and most look boring enough to make you turn to opium. But let’s not digress.

Until now our motoring friends haven’t been electric. The Euro NCAP disaster that is the G-Wiz has failed to win popular approval because it costs too much and looks like a facelifted Greeves Invacar. For less than £5,000 you could instead commute in a road-legal golf cart. So, if you live outside London WC2 and want to drive faster than a Shopmobility cart, the chances are you haven’t even considered something that plugs into the national grid.

Five years ago the notion of fully electric-powered cars was largely sneered at. Nobody wanted a milk float. Sure, floats could drive all day on electric power, but they couldn’t do more than 15mph.

The key to success in the world of amps and kW is size, weight and durability. If a battery the size of a shoe could power a five-passenger car at 110mph for 24 hours, the designer would be swathed in golden robes and could crowd-surf on Greenpeace people’s heads from London to the Lake District.

We’re not quite there yet, but the EV is an electric box that can match a 3.5 litre V6 Nissan 350Z in 0-40mph acceleration, can be 80% charged in less than an hour and has zero exhaust and sound pollution.

Ignore the bodyshell — that’s a Nissan Cube (a supermini available only in Japan that Britain looks set to get in a few years), and the men in lab coats say the final electric creation will not be based on any production model. Hopefully it will be more attractive than it is now and will cease to resemble a Johnny Cab from Total Recall.

Because EVs don’t need a traditional engine or gearbox (no more transmission hump between the seats, or even bonnet), designers can rewrite the rulebook. All the technical gubbins will be hidden under the floor to give a low centre of gravity (which gives decent handling) and more legroom.

For the purposes of this test car, Nissan has inserted three 220lb cases of batteries beneath the seats (the only design rule is that the batteries must sit between the wheels for crash protection). Each case contains 24 laminated (to disperse heat) lithium-ion modules about the size of a small laptop. That may seem a lot of bulk - it’s nearly ½ ton of battery - but it will get smaller. Look at the way mobile phones have grown in power and shrunk in size in the past 10 years.

As far back as the early 1990s Nissan noticed that governments were continually raising the bar on emissions. That was its cue to begin developing batteries that were smaller than Elton John’s piano and could power a car for more than a mile.

More recently Nissan joined forces with NEC to create the AESC (Automotive Energy Supply Corporation), which makes lithium-ion batteries that can deliver twice the power of conventional (nickel hydride) units, store double the energy and offer a longer range. The challenge now is to reduce the amount of precious platinum inside the lithium-ion batteries while making them more powerful and less flabby.

Don’t be surprised to see this technology being sold to other companies and first appearing on UK turf wearing a diamond badge, because Nissan and Renault are in alliance, through cross-shareholdings.

The first thing you realise when driving an electric chariot is that you don’t need to start anything. You turn the ignition key and a dashboard light tells you it’s on. The second thing you notice is that electric motors don’t need revving. Full power is available on tap from the word go, together with a blinding torque surge. This monochrome creation has an 80kW motor (107bhp in old money) and feels mighty rapid. Pressing the EV’s throttle is like turning the knob on your Kenwood food mixer — it’s a giant variable resistor. No oily gearbox required.

The 0-62mph time is conservatively estimated at 13sec, but according to the mind-boggling charts of Satoshi Komiya, the EV project manager, the finished machine will reach 62mph in a hot-hatch-scorching sub-5sec. While Nissan is aiming for 100 miles per full charge (which takes six to eight hours), this mule manages between 62 and 75 miles, depending on whether you use the air-conditioning and listen to the radio loud.

If you have less time, an 80% charge can be had in just 30-60 minutes, and that’s on top of harnessing energy generated from friction when you use the EV’s brakes. During a works tour, I put forward the idea of using solar panels in the roof to allow 24/7 trickle-charging using nature’s energy. This was met with frantic bows and nods from the eco-boffins.

I’d be lying if I said the EV had not impressed me. Sceptics will find little to hate about a car that goes as fast as (or faster than) a prehistoric piston-powered motor, corners and stops like one but has running costs on a par with a Flymo. No more filling up with overpriced flammable fluid. No more checking the oil. You’ll forget what a Wild Bean Cafe looks like.

There is one thing sceptics might bleat about: the silence. Such a terrible thing, silence. A car that makes no noise at all; no exhaust emissions, because there isn’t an exhaust; no eggy-pong catalytic converters or black-soot-puffing diesels. If these EVs take off, then those people who have bought houses inches from the A1 will sleep. Their windows won’t need cleaning every day and their children will never need inhalers. Their cats, however, may get mowed down more frequently.

Silence is golden, unless you govern the Golden State, it seems. California is considering whether to set in law minimum sound levels for electric vehicles because they pose a threat to pedestrians, especially the blind. Presumably an ice cream van’s chime will be lashed behind the grille, or a pre-war klaxon will enjoy rejuvenation. Rest assured: when the time comes, iTunes will feature a selection of simulated engine noise packages to make your EV eco-capsule sound like a Dodge Viper or a Harley-Davidson. Evolution takes two steps forward and one step back.

The Nissan EV goes a long way to proving that a fully electric car can provide driving pleasure and smugness.

Although Japan and the US will receive the bespoke-bodied EV in 2010, global introduction may take a further two years. Denmark, Portugal and Israel have recently agreed to support the introduction of EVs with tax benefits, but providing the high-wattage plug-and-play recharging infrastructure or even battery pack “exchange stations” will be key to the success of the electric car. Over to you, Gordon Brown.

Nissan EV-02

Smith’s verdict

Hurry up and build it

ENGINE Single electric motor and three cases of lithium-ion batteries
POWER 80kW (107bhp)
TRANSMISSION N/a
FUEL N/a
CO2 0g/km
ACCELERATION 0-62mph: 13sec
TOP SPEED 85mph
PRICE N/a
UK RELEASE DATE 2012 (possibly)