We managed to snag a little face time with Nissan super boss Carlos Ghosn here in Beijing. As we expected, he talked mostly about business stuff given that he runs two of the world's biggest automakers, Nissan and Renault. He did, however, spend a few minutes talking about Nissan's electric vehicle program, and it's clear he sees it as a must-have technology for the future survival of the company.
His basic premise?.. There's a huge chunk of the world population that doesn't currently own cars, but they want to own one eventually and nobody is going to stop them. That means millions of additional cars on the world's roads in the coming decades, a situation that makes zero-emission vehicles absolutely essential.
That leaves two paths: pure electric cars and hydrogen fuel cells. As far as Ghosn is concerned, pure electric is the way to go. The infrastructure is already there with no need for new fueling stations, transport systems or training for consumers. Everybody already knows how to plug stuff into the wall; it's too simple to ignore.
According to Ghosn, Nissan will have an electric vehicle in the U.S. by 2010 followed up by a pilot program in Israel in 2011 and worldwide sales in 2012. He says his confidence in the program comes from the fact that the engineers working on it know they have a shot at changing the very nature of the industry.
Of course, good intentions only go so far, but as Ghosn also noted, "We are spending a lot of money on this program." We'll see if it's enough in a couple years. -- Ed Hellwig, Lead Senior Editor, Inside Line
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Having last week visited the Commercial Vehicles Show (NEC,Birmingham,UK) it is evident to me than Carlos Ghosn is not alone in believing that electric vehicles are the way to go. Whereas two makers of electric vans were there last year, six were there this year. Ford seemed to have solidly thrown its weight behind one of them - Smith Electric Vehicles - but Peugeot's mid range vans and peoplecarriers were available via another EV maker, with LDV announcing that it will follow suit in July.
This was a trade show targetting serious fleet managers and business people, not an audience interested in mere concepts and prototypes. And reactions now appearing in the transport journals indicate that electric vehicles have achieved a breakthrough.
I agree that we'll see more electric vehicles, but I doubt it will be the first-time buyers getting them.
Those will be getting Tata Nanos.
Electric cars will be sold to rich/upper middle class folks that commute in city environments.
They will be way too costly for the first-time car buying public from India and China.
There really is no reason an electric vehicle has to be expensive if it only has to match the Nanos in performance.
Electric motors are cheap and the car can be made very simple. If you don't need to go fast or far then there's no reason you can't build electric cars for less then a gas car.