Nissan: EV Business Will Be "Real" Business
By Michelle Krebs April 28, 2009By Bill Visnic
NOVI, Michigan -- Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. is ratcheting up its electric vehicle talk and expanding pilot programs around the nation in preparation for a battery-powered electric car it plans to mass-market sometime around 2012.
And Larry Dominique, vice president-product planning for Nissan Americas, promises that unlike previous efforts to mainstream somewhat weird electric vehicles, Nissan plans a full-blooded sales and marketing effort -- and that the still-unseen vehicle will be no oddity.
"First and foremost, it's a real car," Dominique said at a media event here in which journalists drove a Nissan Cube propelled by what is a close facsimile of the electric driveline slated for the production EV.
Dominique also said Nissan is certain its EV will not be a repeat of the industry's past mistakes in delivering a non-polluting car -- General Motors Corp.'s late-'90s EV1 being the poster child for great promise let down by technical limitations.
"This is, in our opinion, a zero-emissions reality," Dominique said.
He does admit, however, the initial rollout of the car will be restricted to a dozen or so major markets -- all almost certainly in fair-weather regions and mirroring places in which Nissan currently is running pilot programs, such as the Tucson and San Diego metro areas, as well as California's Sonoma county and in Oregon and Nissan's headquarters state of Tennessee.
He also said the car would be sold in all 50 states "as soon as we can."
"We still have some work to do," on the car's business case, he said, but added that the eventual cost to the consumer should be less than the total operating cost of a comparable
conventional car.
A key factor in that equation will be in who "owns" the expensive lithium-ion battery pack that provides the car with as much as 100 miles of driving range. Nissan may be leaning toward an arrangement in which the battery pack is leased, regardless of whether the owner purchases or leases the vehicle itself.
The business of the Nissan EV's business case also presumably will be based on the expectation that a customer will be able to take advantage of a plump $7,500 tax incentive that's currently available for the first 200,000 fully electric vehicles sold by major automakers. And Nissan reckons an owner driving 15,000 miles annually could save considerably on "fuel" costs, as the EV is predicted to cost about 4 cents per mile for fuel.
Dominique said the No. 1 concern for consumers who want to improve fuel-efficiency is to avoid sacrificing interior space.
To address the issue, Dominique says the EV will be packaged as a fully functional five-occupant car bridging the B- and C-segments -- a size roughly that of Toyota's well-received Prius hybrid-electric vehicle.
He said a key acceptance factor will be in convincing customers that at least one car in their garage seldom travels anything near the EVs 100-mile range in a typical day -- that such an EV could be used as a primary vehicle "all week long," with an internal-combustion vehicle used for longer voyages.
Photos by Nissan
1 -- Pay no attention to the body shell. Nissan's production electric vehicle, coming next year and proposed for mass-production in 2012, will be markedly more aerodynamic than this Cube fitted with an electric driveline.
2 -- The key for worldwide electric-intensive vehicle development: lithium-ion battery technology. Nissan engineers aren't yet divulging battery capacity for the fully electric vehicle being launched in the U.S. and Japan next year.
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