The 2018 Nissan LEAF won the J.D. Power Engineering Award for the highest rated vehicle redesign.

The J.D Power Engineering Awards were presented at the annual Society of Automotive Engineers 2019 WCX World Congress Experience, held at the Cobo Center in Detroit, where the 2018 Nissan LEAF won an award.

“This award is a credit to hundreds of Nissan technical professionals here in the U.S., as well as in Japan,” said Chris Reed, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Nissan North America. “Any vehicle redesign requires a massive amount of coordination across many functional teams, and I am very proud of the excellent vehicle this effort produced which has been recognized by J.D. Power.”

Just last month, J.D. Power introduced two new categories for engineering achievement awards: the Highest-Rated Vehicle All-New and the Highest-Rated Redesign Vehicle for the 2018 model year.

Fitting into the latter category, the new redesign of the LEAF boasts better upgrades, including the introduction of the LEAF PLUS model to the 2019 lineup. The redesign has an added 62 kWh capable of up to 226 miles of range.

“While J.D. Power has become known for benchmarking quality in all phases of the automotive industry for the past 50-plus years, we wanted to recognize the achievements of the engineers who translate concept vehicles into practical road vehicles,” said Doug Betts, Senior Vice President of Global Automotive at J.D. Power. “Nissan launched its first LEAF vehicle in 2010, and their engineers were able to utilize the lessons learned from that vehicle and successfully apply improvements to the redesigned vehicle.”