lne937s
Well-known member
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2010
- Messages
- 250
NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/business/global/03nissan.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1291313017-3uHCmdc6F0fOLVBExl3AAQ
December 2, 2010
Nissan Sees Electric Car Envy in Critics of the LeafBy HIROKO TABUCHI
YOKOHAMA, JAPAN — Overhyped. Fanciful. Just not viable.
Skeptics have been harsh in their appraisal of Nissan’s grand electric car plans — which the automaker will roll out this month with its all-electric Leaf compact — scoffing at everything from the car’s limited driving range to what they consider its overly high price tag.
But Carlos Ghosn, chief executive at Nissan and its sister automaker, Renault, dismisses the scoffing as his rivals’ lack of imagination — and their electric car envy.
“They don’t have one, so it’s not a surprise,” Mr. Ghosn said in an interview here this week at Nissan headquarters. “People who are challenged by innovation are going to fight it in the beginning,” he said. “Get ready to see a lot of converts.”
Mr. Ghosn, whose stint running two global manufacturers has been so admired that the administration of President Barack Obama courted him unsuccessfully last year to overhaul General Motors, is staking his reputation on what he calls the world’s first mass-produced electric car. The Leaf, a hatchback that the U.S. authorities say can run in the range of 73 to 110 miles, or 117 to 177 kilometers, on a fully charged battery, will start selling later this month for $32,780 in selected markets in the United States. It will also go on sale in Japan for ¥3.76 million, before being introduced to European markets next year.
The Leaf is part of a bigger mission by Mr. Ghosn to redefine a brand that has been something of a laggard in green technology, a field long dominated by Toyota and its pioneering Prius gasoline-electric hybrid.
“Nissan was a ‘me too’ company,” Mr. Ghosn said. “But in electric, we’re pioneers.”
Initial inventories of the Leaf will be modest. The automaker has the capacity to make 50,000 units in the first year, 20,000 of which will be allocated to the United States. Nissan has been taking reservations since earlier this year and says it has filled its U.S. quota already.
Where Mr. Ghosn and the skeptics diverge is in his forecasts for coming years, not only for the Leaf but for electric vehicles generally.
Mr. Ghosn said Nissan expected to sell at least one million units of the Leaf in its first six years — considered a model’s standard life cycle — and recoup the company’s investment within that period. In comparison, it took the Toyota Prius more than a decade from its 1997 debut to hit the one million-unit sales mark.
“We’re not selling 5,000 or 10,000 cars,” Mr. Ghosn said. “We’re talking about a massive option in the market.”
Mr. Ghosn — who splits his time between Yokohama, Japan, and the Paris offices of Renault, which owns 43 percent of Nissan — sees the Leaf as setting off a wider shift toward electric cars. Together with Renault, Nissan has spent €4 billion, or nearly $5.3 billion, since 1992 to develop the Leaf and seven other all-electric models in a joint zero-emissions project.
By 2020, Mr. Ghosn said, electric cars will account for one-tenth of global auto sales, a bullish estimate that makes him the industry’s biggest advocate of electric vehicle technology. Nissan aims to dominate that segment with at least a 20 percent share, or about double Nissan’s global market share in gasoline-powered cars, he said.
Most industry forecasts have been far more conservative. J.D. Power, the market research company, predicts that in 2020 only 1.3 million of a projected 70.9 million cars that will be sold worldwide will be electric, fewer than 2 percent. Even the most optimistic analysts put the figure at no more than 5 percent.
And while most other big auto companies plan to sell some sort of all-electric cars eventually, their executives predict they will be fringe products.
In October, Dieter Zetsche, Daimler’s chief executive, said he expected electric cars to occupy as little as 1 percent of the global auto market in 2020. Ford estimates electric vehicle market share by then of only 1 percent to 2 percent, and Toyota executives have been similarly pessimistic.
Timothy Manganello, chief of the supplier BorgWarner, has dismissed electric cars as unprofitable. “The more these guys make electric vehicles,” he said in an interview with Reuters, “the more money they’re going to lose.”
The doubts about electric cars include concerns about their relatively low horsepower, the reliability of a new technology and the prospect of the batteries’ losing their charge on the road. The sticker-price premium of an electric car over a gasoline one will also dissuade consumers, critics say, especially now that gasoline prices have steadied.
Buyers of electric cars, the pessimists predict, will be limited to a demographic niche: high-income, environmentally conscious and early adopters of technology. “It will be difficult to convince large numbers of consumers to switch from conventionally powered passenger vehicles,” J.D. Power said in a report in October.
Mr. Ghosn has spent months trying to counter those concerns, one by one. He said the Leaf’s roughly 100-mile, or 160-kilometer, traveling range between charges meets the needs of most motorists. And he urges skeptics to test the Leaf, to experience its virtues: “Absolutely no harm to the environment! No noise! No smell! No vibration!”
Volume production will bring down costs, Mr. Ghosn said, while tax credits, which Nissan says come to $7,500 in the United States, will offset some of the Leaf’s price premium.
Nissan says it is working hard on the recharging challenge, too. Earlier this year, it announced it had developed a public charging station that replenishes the Leaf’s battery to 80 percent capacity in less than 30 minutes, instead of the eight hours it takes from a regular plug-in. The Leaf’s lithium-ion battery pack carries a warranty of eight years, or 100,000 miles, Nissan says.
And while Mr. Ghosn acknowledged that the Leaf would not appeal to everyone, he said there was a viable target audience. “The guy who is today driving a large pickup truck, doing a hundred miles a day — if he doesn’t come buy our electric cars, it’s not a problem,” Mr. Ghosn said. “Whom we are addressing first are environmentally conscious people who drive relatively moderate distances and really want something that’s completely independent of oil.” Those target consumers, he said, make up more than 10 percent of the market.
Mr. Ghosn’s confidence is rooted partly in Nissan’s strong rebound from a slump during the global economic crisis. In its most recent quarter, Nissan’s net profit increased fourfold from a year earlier, prompting the automaker to raise its full-year net profit forecast to ¥270 billion yen, or $3.21 billion, almost twice the previous estimate of ¥150 billion. It is Nissan’s second turnaround under Mr. Ghosn, a Lebanese-Brazilian Frenchman who took the helm in 1999 and brought the automaker back from the brink of bankruptcy.
Mr. Ghosn cites moves by his rivals to step up their electric vehicle development as evidence that his is the right strategy. While Toyota is careful to play down the prospects of the electric car in favor of its prized hybrid technology, it has slowly broadened its electric vehicle plans, saying last month that it would expand the 2012 rollout of its all-electric ultracompact, the iQ.
But perhaps the biggest battle is the one about to begin between the Leaf and General Motors’ Volt battery-powered car, which will also go on sale this month, for $41,000 before government subsidies.
Mr. Ghosn said the Volt was not a direct competitor because it would carry a gasoline engine to kick in after 50 miles on batteries.
The biggest constraint on Leaf sales, Mr. Ghosn said, would be how many electric cars Nissan’s factories can churn out. Over the next two years, the company, which now makes the Leaf only in Japan, plans to open assembly and battery factories in Europe, North America and Asia that will give it the capacity to make 500,000 electric vehicles a year.
But Nissan also appears to be hedging is bets. In October, it introduced the Infiniti M hybrid, its first mass-produced hybrid model besides the hybrid Altima sedan, which uses Toyota’s technology. Analysts have warned that developing multiple powertrains could weigh on Nissan’s finances. But for this, too, Mr. Ghosn has a counterargument. “There’s demand for other types of cars — it’s not simply either-or,” he said. “But people who buy electric cars,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, “they will never ever buy another type of car again.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/business/global/03nissan.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1291313017-3uHCmdc6F0fOLVBExl3AAQ
December 2, 2010
Nissan Sees Electric Car Envy in Critics of the LeafBy HIROKO TABUCHI
YOKOHAMA, JAPAN — Overhyped. Fanciful. Just not viable.
Skeptics have been harsh in their appraisal of Nissan’s grand electric car plans — which the automaker will roll out this month with its all-electric Leaf compact — scoffing at everything from the car’s limited driving range to what they consider its overly high price tag.
But Carlos Ghosn, chief executive at Nissan and its sister automaker, Renault, dismisses the scoffing as his rivals’ lack of imagination — and their electric car envy.
“They don’t have one, so it’s not a surprise,” Mr. Ghosn said in an interview here this week at Nissan headquarters. “People who are challenged by innovation are going to fight it in the beginning,” he said. “Get ready to see a lot of converts.”
Mr. Ghosn, whose stint running two global manufacturers has been so admired that the administration of President Barack Obama courted him unsuccessfully last year to overhaul General Motors, is staking his reputation on what he calls the world’s first mass-produced electric car. The Leaf, a hatchback that the U.S. authorities say can run in the range of 73 to 110 miles, or 117 to 177 kilometers, on a fully charged battery, will start selling later this month for $32,780 in selected markets in the United States. It will also go on sale in Japan for ¥3.76 million, before being introduced to European markets next year.
The Leaf is part of a bigger mission by Mr. Ghosn to redefine a brand that has been something of a laggard in green technology, a field long dominated by Toyota and its pioneering Prius gasoline-electric hybrid.
“Nissan was a ‘me too’ company,” Mr. Ghosn said. “But in electric, we’re pioneers.”
Initial inventories of the Leaf will be modest. The automaker has the capacity to make 50,000 units in the first year, 20,000 of which will be allocated to the United States. Nissan has been taking reservations since earlier this year and says it has filled its U.S. quota already.
Where Mr. Ghosn and the skeptics diverge is in his forecasts for coming years, not only for the Leaf but for electric vehicles generally.
Mr. Ghosn said Nissan expected to sell at least one million units of the Leaf in its first six years — considered a model’s standard life cycle — and recoup the company’s investment within that period. In comparison, it took the Toyota Prius more than a decade from its 1997 debut to hit the one million-unit sales mark.
“We’re not selling 5,000 or 10,000 cars,” Mr. Ghosn said. “We’re talking about a massive option in the market.”
Mr. Ghosn — who splits his time between Yokohama, Japan, and the Paris offices of Renault, which owns 43 percent of Nissan — sees the Leaf as setting off a wider shift toward electric cars. Together with Renault, Nissan has spent €4 billion, or nearly $5.3 billion, since 1992 to develop the Leaf and seven other all-electric models in a joint zero-emissions project.
By 2020, Mr. Ghosn said, electric cars will account for one-tenth of global auto sales, a bullish estimate that makes him the industry’s biggest advocate of electric vehicle technology. Nissan aims to dominate that segment with at least a 20 percent share, or about double Nissan’s global market share in gasoline-powered cars, he said.
Most industry forecasts have been far more conservative. J.D. Power, the market research company, predicts that in 2020 only 1.3 million of a projected 70.9 million cars that will be sold worldwide will be electric, fewer than 2 percent. Even the most optimistic analysts put the figure at no more than 5 percent.
And while most other big auto companies plan to sell some sort of all-electric cars eventually, their executives predict they will be fringe products.
In October, Dieter Zetsche, Daimler’s chief executive, said he expected electric cars to occupy as little as 1 percent of the global auto market in 2020. Ford estimates electric vehicle market share by then of only 1 percent to 2 percent, and Toyota executives have been similarly pessimistic.
Timothy Manganello, chief of the supplier BorgWarner, has dismissed electric cars as unprofitable. “The more these guys make electric vehicles,” he said in an interview with Reuters, “the more money they’re going to lose.”
The doubts about electric cars include concerns about their relatively low horsepower, the reliability of a new technology and the prospect of the batteries’ losing their charge on the road. The sticker-price premium of an electric car over a gasoline one will also dissuade consumers, critics say, especially now that gasoline prices have steadied.
Buyers of electric cars, the pessimists predict, will be limited to a demographic niche: high-income, environmentally conscious and early adopters of technology. “It will be difficult to convince large numbers of consumers to switch from conventionally powered passenger vehicles,” J.D. Power said in a report in October.
Mr. Ghosn has spent months trying to counter those concerns, one by one. He said the Leaf’s roughly 100-mile, or 160-kilometer, traveling range between charges meets the needs of most motorists. And he urges skeptics to test the Leaf, to experience its virtues: “Absolutely no harm to the environment! No noise! No smell! No vibration!”
Volume production will bring down costs, Mr. Ghosn said, while tax credits, which Nissan says come to $7,500 in the United States, will offset some of the Leaf’s price premium.
Nissan says it is working hard on the recharging challenge, too. Earlier this year, it announced it had developed a public charging station that replenishes the Leaf’s battery to 80 percent capacity in less than 30 minutes, instead of the eight hours it takes from a regular plug-in. The Leaf’s lithium-ion battery pack carries a warranty of eight years, or 100,000 miles, Nissan says.
And while Mr. Ghosn acknowledged that the Leaf would not appeal to everyone, he said there was a viable target audience. “The guy who is today driving a large pickup truck, doing a hundred miles a day — if he doesn’t come buy our electric cars, it’s not a problem,” Mr. Ghosn said. “Whom we are addressing first are environmentally conscious people who drive relatively moderate distances and really want something that’s completely independent of oil.” Those target consumers, he said, make up more than 10 percent of the market.
Mr. Ghosn’s confidence is rooted partly in Nissan’s strong rebound from a slump during the global economic crisis. In its most recent quarter, Nissan’s net profit increased fourfold from a year earlier, prompting the automaker to raise its full-year net profit forecast to ¥270 billion yen, or $3.21 billion, almost twice the previous estimate of ¥150 billion. It is Nissan’s second turnaround under Mr. Ghosn, a Lebanese-Brazilian Frenchman who took the helm in 1999 and brought the automaker back from the brink of bankruptcy.
Mr. Ghosn cites moves by his rivals to step up their electric vehicle development as evidence that his is the right strategy. While Toyota is careful to play down the prospects of the electric car in favor of its prized hybrid technology, it has slowly broadened its electric vehicle plans, saying last month that it would expand the 2012 rollout of its all-electric ultracompact, the iQ.
But perhaps the biggest battle is the one about to begin between the Leaf and General Motors’ Volt battery-powered car, which will also go on sale this month, for $41,000 before government subsidies.
Mr. Ghosn said the Volt was not a direct competitor because it would carry a gasoline engine to kick in after 50 miles on batteries.
The biggest constraint on Leaf sales, Mr. Ghosn said, would be how many electric cars Nissan’s factories can churn out. Over the next two years, the company, which now makes the Leaf only in Japan, plans to open assembly and battery factories in Europe, North America and Asia that will give it the capacity to make 500,000 electric vehicles a year.
But Nissan also appears to be hedging is bets. In October, it introduced the Infiniti M hybrid, its first mass-produced hybrid model besides the hybrid Altima sedan, which uses Toyota’s technology. Analysts have warned that developing multiple powertrains could weigh on Nissan’s finances. But for this, too, Mr. Ghosn has a counterargument. “There’s demand for other types of cars — it’s not simply either-or,” he said. “But people who buy electric cars,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, “they will never ever buy another type of car again.”
