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Mitsubishi isn’t selling as many EVs as it projected

The global president of the Mitsubishi Motors Corporations has recently said that his company’s electric vehicle sales are not within their projected numbers.

It’s quite a major thing to acknowledge, especially when you consider the company’s very positive stance on EVs in general, and implicitly the philosophical and financial commitment that come with it.

The company has fallen short of last year’s sales in Australia for instance, five less i-MiEVs, and in Europe the sales and production of the i-MiEV’s better looking cousins have been slow as well, with the Peugeot iON and the Citroen C-Zeros having actually been put on hold since August due to very poor demand – less than two thousand units were sold for both cars combined across all of mainland Europe for the first half of 2012.

Mitsubishi’s president, Osamu Masuko, mentioned that there are a couple of factors that have slowed the sales, one of them being that the European market – a big market for electric cars – has been suffering badly from the financial crisis, and the other being the high Japanese Yen.

He also added that the high price of electric cars has also been a problem for the technology in gaining mass-market appeal.

Despite all of these problems Mitsubishi is still working on EV solutions by creating the soon to be launched PHEV, first of which being the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. These vehicles will combine the traditional petrol motor to act as a generator for the electric drive, so as to eliminate the low cruising range.

This doesn’t mean however that they’re giving up on pure electric vehicles, they are still very hard at work to increase the cruising range of their electric vehicles and also investing in the development of EV-related infrastructure.

He did also note that during last year’s catastrophic Japanese earthquake, it was electric vehicles that were put to heavy use because electricity was made available to the affected regions far quicker than petrol supply could be restored, so they know that they are a worthwhile investment.

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