NISSAN BETS BIG ON EV FUTURE

Hoping to compete once again as a leader in electric vehicle technology and sales, Japan’s Nissan Motor Co. has announced a commitment of about $17.7 billion to “democratize” electric vehicle (EV) ownership.
The plan, dubbed Nissan Ambition 2030, calls for 75 percent of the company’s European sales to be in EVs by fiscal 2026 and 40 percent in the U.S. by fiscal 2030.
By 2030, Nissan plans to be making 23 “electrified” vehicles. Of them, 15 will be fully electric. The rest would be hybrids or be built with Nissan’s “e-power” system, which uses a gasoline engine to recharge a battery bank that powers the vehicle.
Nissan also will invest the equivalent of $1.4 billion to convert a U.K. plant to build EVs.
The strategy is based on Nissan’s all-solid-state battery technology, which cuts costs, improves vehicle range, and is safer, but has not yet been scaled for commercial manufacturing.
Nissan also will continue to research improvements to the conventional lithium-ion batteries EVs rely on now, CEO Makoto Uchida said in a statement announcing the company’s vision.
The cost of lithium-ion power packs could be cut by 65 percent within eight years, he said.
TREND FORECAST: With battery and charging technologies making significant improvements (see “Charger Delivers 60 Miles of EV Range in 3 Minutes” 12 Oct 2021 and “New Lithium Battery Design Could Charge EVs Ten Times Faster” in this issue), car makers will focus more resources on commercializing EVs, especially now that cities and entire countries, such as France, and Norway, have pledged to ban sales of gas buggies after 2030.