Buy Nissan's new electric car, the Leaf, in California, and you may qualify for a $5,000 rebate from the state. Buy the Leaf's closest competitor, the Chevrolet Volt, and the state will give you nothing. The Leaf and the Volt represent the next wave of plug-in cars, both of them hitting the market in California later this year. Nissan and General Motors are already taking reservations. But of the two, only the Leaf will likely qualify this year for a rebate under a California program for cars that emit little or no tailpipe pollution. And that would contribute to a significant difference in price between the two cars. State officials say Nissan has not yet submitted the formal paperwork to have the car certified for the rebate program. But as an all-electric car powered by rechargeable batteries, the Leaf will almost certainly qualify, they said. 'Even though it may not be certified today, we know it's going to be a zero-emission vehicle,' said Craig Childers, air resources engineer with the California Air Resources Board. 'I drove one last week, and I don't think they were hiding a (gas) engine somewhere.' GM plans to submit the Volt for certification by the rebate program in 2012, a company representative said. Even then, the car won't fetch as big a rebate as the Leaf. Most likely, Volt buyers will get $3,000. The rebate program reserves the biggest incentives for vehicles that produce no tailpipe pollution at all, such as electric cars. The Volt, in contrast, is a plug-in hybrid that runs on batteries for the first 40 miles of every trip before switching on a gasoline engine to power the car's electric motor. Hence the smaller rebate. GM's decision not to pursue the rebates until 2012 was a matter of strategy and timing. The automaker developed the Volt on a tight schedule, said Shad Balch, environment and energy policy specialist at GM. Rather than design the car around multiple environmental standards, the company chose to focus first on meeting the requirements for a $7,500 clean-car tax credit from the federal government. Both the Leaf and the Volt qualify for the federal credit. 'We had to set a target and a date, and we had to aim everything at that target,' Balch said. He noted that the California rebate program, with only $4.1 million in funding per fiscal year, would not cover many cars. Rebates are handed out on a first-come, first-served basis. In addition, meeting California's standards for the $3,000 rebate would have required some changes to the car's engineering, changes Balch said were proprietary information. 'It's not worth it for us to delay the launch for the low number of rebates that would be available,' he said. The California rebate would appear to give Nissan a slight edge over GM. The Leaf will have a sticker price of $32,780. Factor in the federal tax credit and the California rebate, and the price will drop to $20,280. The Volt will cost $41,000, or $33,500 with the federal tax credit. The cars, however, have different selling points. The Leaf is cheaper but can only go about 100 miles before needing a recharge. With its backup gasoline engine, the Volt has no such limit. 'They're going to appeal to two different kinds of buyers,' said John O'Dell, a senior editor at the Edmunds.com auto information website. 'It'll be a slight disadvantage (for GM) with the people who are more cost-conscious and less range-conscious.' A Nissan spokesman echoed that point, saying the Volt and the Leaf are very different cars. He added that the company is taking reservations for the car nationwide, including in states that offer no rebates for clean cars. 'The rebate's nice to have, but we've got 17,000 people across the country who have put down a reservation on the car, not all of them in California,' said Nissan spokesman Tim Gallagher. 