Nissan’s future EV plans
Nissan Leaf
Nissan is looking forward for their zero-emission product category, saying that an electric vehicle smaller than the current Nissan Leaf is in the planning stages for 2017.
The company is committed to the concept of “micro-mobility” and pointed to its alliance partner Renault’s Zoe model as a good trend-setter for things to come in the near to future.
However Nissan plan on keeping the Zoe as a starting-off point for their future EV design, because the future will require more than just a small car, they’ll want to make a compact and creative city commuter because as Francois Bancon – Nissan’s general manager of product strategy, advanced and exploratory planning – admitted, the Nissan Leaf is a bit conservative in its design, with the future wave of EVs planning to open up new opportunities that have not yet been tapped.
However the Leaf is important because it is meant to create credibility and also give the technology a proper test, it was never about innovation per se. Electric Vehicles are still a relatively new thing, a rather big thing, and just like with all other major things, change must come at a steady pace.
The goals of Renault-Nissan are very ambitious when it comes to EVs, they plan on making the purchase price for an EV equivalent to that of mainstream family cars in Europe by the end of the decade – a lofty goal indeed.
However it has to be noted that the cars themselves will still cost more than their more traditional fossil fuel consuming predecessors, however the pricing that Nissan is referring to, would take into account the varied financial incentives that many governments offer to those who purchase non-fossil fuel consuming cars.
Nissan expects for Electric Vehicles to account for as much as ten percent of the global automotive industry by 2020, and even if this estimate is about half what analysts considered it would be earlier in the decade, Nissan plans to take a quarter of it.
