Nissan’s Electric Vehicle
Last week it was announced that Nissan would be teaming up with the city of San Diego to create a test infrastructure for electric vehicle charging. Nissan would supply the cars for a municipal vehicle fleet and the San Diego Gas and Electric company would provide charging stations. Initial details about Nissan’s EV were scarce, but now there’s some solid information on the vehicles that will power this experiment and eventually hit dealer showrooms.
There are all sorts of details about the Nissan EV, but let’s start with the big one: the car has a 100 mile pure electric range and, if plugged in during off-peak hours, will only cost 90 cents to charge. You read that right, 100 miles on less than a dollar.
Okay, with that bombshell out of the way, how will Nissan accomplish such a feat as well as making the car affordable to the average consumer? The biggest advantage on the company’s side is the passion of its CEO, Carlos Ghosn. Nissan has yet to begin marketing electric vehicles because Ghosn is pushing for a vehicle that can be mass marketed around the world, not only to a few select, and usually very wealthy, buyers. As Nissan’s product planning director puts it, “”We may not be the first to market with an EV, but we’ll be the first to mass-market an EV.”
The preliminary EVs being supplied by Nissan for the San Diego project are based of off the company’s five-door hatchback Cube model, but this will not be how the car is sold to fleets when it is released between late 2010 and mid-2011, and to average consumers in 2012. Rather, the Cube chassis is simply serving as a test platform for the electric drivetrain. The finished model, though, will be a five-door, and will likely have similar measurements as the Cube’s chassis (else, why would they have chosen it for a test platform?).
Considering that the Nissan EV is still at least a year and a half away, the test models seem as though they’re ready for the showroom floor already. Acceleration is quick, steering is nimble, the car feels like a car and not a pale electric imitation. Charging-wise, the Nissan’s lithium ion battery pack is impressive: with the average household’s 110-volt line, a full charge takes 14 hours; with a 220-volt line (like those that run clothes dryers), it will take 4 hours; and, if you have access to a 440-volt line, like those that many commercial buildings use, an 80% charge can be achieved in about a half hour. While not officially confirmed, it is reasonable to assume that the 440-volt charging system may form the backbone of the San Diego test charging infrastructure.
One of the big hurdles for electric vehicles to jump is that in order to draw lots of drivers they must prove to be more economically viable than their fossil fuel-burning cousins. Exact pricing has not been unveiled for the Nissan EV, but the company has been diligent about its math: the only way for a gasoline-powered vehicle to be considered more economically viable than the upcoming EV is for gas prices to drop below $1.10 per gallon, and that seems like a long shot.
