Nubo said:
reeler said:
...That or Chevy and Nissan will slot their offering in at $25K base. That will be tough with no vertically-integrated battery factory....
I thought Nissan did have their own battery factory, in TN? Capacity was 200,000 units per year, iirc...
Yep, they do; in fact they have 3 of them: in Tennessee, in Japan, and in England. And yes it has been said that the Tennessee plant could produce 200,000 packs at full capacity.
I'm assuming that the 3 factories are all very roughly the same capacity since the Japanese plant handled all early LEAF production until the US factory came online, and the England factory handles all of the European supply (of the LEAF as well as thr NV200).
By the way, it was confirmed a few months ago that the England plant had swapped over to producing the 60 kWh packs, so I'm more and more inclined to believe we'll see the new LEAF at the end of the year as previously hinted.
As to the Gigafactory being a crucial price advantage, I'm not so sure. Tesla stated that their (public, anyway) intended price reduction target was 30%, to be achieved through economies of scale. That's isn't anything to sneeze at, especially given their already low price per kWh, but Chevy has stated that they can source their batteries for $125/kWh now with the Bolt. And Nissan has already stated years ago that their upcoming NMC chemistry will nearly halve the cost of the Nissan batteries (if they continue down that route - even a year now is quite a while when it comes to battery tech).