Nissan Leaf deliveries crawling along in Japan

Nissan delivered its first Leaf to a U.S. customer back on December 11th of 2010. By the end of last year, the Japanese automaker had reportedly handed off the keys to 19 Leaf buyers in the States. While there's been some talk of Nissan delaying deliveries of its electric hatch here in the U.S., not much has been made of what's going on over in Japan.

Japan Today reports that, via info obtained from informed sources, Nissan has delivered 60 battery-powered Leafs in Japan. Apparently, the automaker has recorded 6,000 orders for its electric hatch in Japan and expects to fulfill all of those requests by the end of March. Apparently, the slow initial roll out is, according to Nissan's chief operating officer Toshiyuki Shiga, part of the plan:

We want to launch the Leaf entirely free of troubles. We are making the cars a bit slowly while taking thorough care. We might make our customers wait.

Meanwhile, Japan Today quotes an undisclosed Nissan official, who claims that:

As it is our first major project to mass produce EVs, we began building them with caution... Production lines are working fine, so we expect to fill the orders as planned.

[Source: Japan Today]