I went for a test drive of a leaf here in Hong Kong. It handled well, and coped with the hills effortlessly. Very very quiet. The only downside was that Nissan hadn't bothered to install Hong Kong maps in the GPS (making half the center console functions useless).
The core problem is the US$54,000 price tag. Even tax free (as it is an EV), given the prices elsewhere, I can't see how they justify this. Nissan have quite simply gotten greedy. At that price, it compares to a luxury BMW, and the Eco-aware drivers are looking at the Prius (even paying tax, that is 25% cheaper).
The Government have cut the usual 50-100% first registration tax on new car purchases, for EVs, to zero - in order to promote their uptake. And, the EV manufacturers are using that to jack-up their pricing to make more profit on less volume. The point of the incentives is to increase volume, not per-unit margin of the car companies.
The second issue is charging, an promoting expansion of shopping-mall 13amp/220volt chargers is not going to help. They really are missing the point. Home overnight, or office day-time, charging is the only viable solution I see.
But given that Nissan have only brought in a couple hundred leafs this year, and they look set to sell them all, it looks like their pricing was correct for that volume.
I'm told there are close to 200 leafs on the road in HK now, and that is a good start. If they had been selling this at the US price of US$35k, and had the inventory, things would be different.