What do you think of the Nissan Leaf? Mostly this is a car that we look at with a combination of admiration and bewilderment. The Leaf is the best-selling EV model on the market today, which Tesla hopes to take over with the Model 3, but its typically thought of as a small and short ranged vehicle. This car has a quirky design that most of us learn to live with when we buy the Leaf, but considering Nissan’s history of performance vehicles it seems there would be at least a performance EV model from them somewhere.

Currently Nissan is looking to develop a modular platform that could underpin not only a new Leaf, but also a hatchback and a sports car. If the auto shows we have seen this year are any indicator as to what we should expect in the future we will see high performance electric models on the market from every automaker soon. Because Nissan already makes the Leaf they should have a lead in the market for this to happen, but there is one dilemma they are facing when it comes to using the platform the Leaf currently uses and creating a performance machine from it.

Currently the Leaf uses a package that has the batteries under the floor which is great for an electric crossover because height won’t matter, but for a low-slung sports car this won’t work at all. The expected development time is an estimated five years as of right now, but with some of the vehicles that have already been shown in concept form by Nissan you might think they were much closer to the answers they are looking for than this estimation. This is the company that showed off with the Esflow concept in 2011 in Geneva and last year brought the IDx concept to our view.

The Esflow was to be a car that would combine the Z-car sports styling with the EV powertrain of the new Leaf. This would be a small rear drive coupe that was built mostly off what the Leaf had to offer, but the low 107 horsepower of this car was not enough to get us excited, but a time to sixty mph of less than five seconds would be enticing enough and would have been possible because of the low weight of the car that did bring in a good amount of torque for us to admire.

The problem with the IDx is that it would need to be built on its own platform. There has been much evidence in the past that small sports cars can be unprofitable as halo vehicles and basing other cars on the platform of a small sports car is difficult to sell. A modular platform certainly makes more sense and may offer us an opportunity to see the IDx in a new way with different underpinnings. Hopefully this won’t take five years as there will be some supercars that are EV models on the market in the next couple years and it would certainly benefit the market and Nissan to have an exciting Z-car EV model to admire and enjoy as well.