(Elbil24): Nissan today presented its new business plan, in which they briefly describe all the investments to be made towards 2030 in their entirety, but also divided into short, medium and long-term perspectives. Nissan calls the plans The Arc, and it is in the nature of the matter that much of this plan was about electrification.
The short version of the plans is that they will launch 27 new electrified models by 2030, of which 19 will be fully electric.
Overall, this should give them a model mix where 55 percent of all the cars they will sell will be electrified. But as we have written so many times before on Elbil24, it is important to distinguish between fully electric cars and electrified cars.
The latter group consists of both mild hybrids, hybrids and rechargeable hybrids. Only fully electric cars fall under the category of electric cars – be they battery electric or hydrogen electric.
Nissan, like Toyota and some other manufacturers, is a global player that has to deal with the respective markets in different ways, and the degree of acceptance that each individual market has when it comes to the electrification process.
President and CEO: It was the boss himself, Makoto Uchida, who presented the new business plan – The Arc.
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Values over volume
Nissan is clear that they are now in a phase where it is more important to build values and credibility than volume. In that way, they should also be able to increase earnings, rather than just focusing on turnover. These are nice words, but we consumers are usually more concerned with being presented with cars we want to buy, more than counting Nissan’s money.
What we have to report about this is that Nissan intends to take electric cars from a share of 9 percent of the portfolio in 2023, and up to 20 percent as quickly as 2026. This may not sound like much, but we must remember that we are talking about the company that has produced the most electric cars over time – ever since the Nissan Leaf went into production in 2011. Perhaps it becomes a little more understandable when we say that the mix in Europe will be more than 40 percent pure electric cars in 2026.
To achieve this, they will launch two new electric cars in 2024, two new pure electric cars in 2025, and then four electric cars in 2026. We saw some of these cars as concepts when we were at the Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo in November.
See more photos of Nissan from Tokyo here:
The largest, also in Norway
And for those who don’t quite see the big picture, the Nissan Leaf is still the electric car of which the most copies have been registered in Norway, and by a good margin. To quantify this, at the time of writing there are 79,699 Nissan Leafs registered in Norway, while up to now 53,822 Tesla Model Ys have been registered, which is in second place.
That the share of electric cars for Nissan is at a marginal 9 percent until now is not because they sell low volumes of electric cars, but because extremely large volumes of other types of cars are sold in other parts of the world, such as Asia, the USA, South America, and so on further.
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Partnership
In order to create the change Nissan is now putting forward the plans for, they must change their focus areas in the same way that most other car manufacturers have to. It is moving at high speed towards more software-driven development, and here, among other things, Nissan will make greater use of Ampere, the company in the Renault-Nissan alliance that works exclusively with software.
In addition to this, they have announced a closer collaboration with both Mitsubishi Motors – including a 1-tonne pickup – and with Dongfeng Nissan, which is a Chinese offshoot.
Overall, Nissan says that as many as 15 out of 30 new models will be developed by the strategic partners, of which Honda was also recently drawn in as one of them.
This should therefore give them 30 new models in the portfolio, which are expected to increase sales by a million units. This should collectively give them an increased earnings of six percent.
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New battery technology
Nissan also said that they are investing further in the development of batteries, but also this in collaboration with partners, which for their part are AESC, CATL, VEJ and Sunwoda. To give a picture of which markets are the largest and smallest, we can mention that Nissan must secure a production capacity of 135 GWh by 2030. Of these, 60 GWh will be intended for the USA, 40 GWh for China, 25 GWh for Europe, and 10 GWh for Japan.
Towards 2028, great emphasis is also placed on developing increasingly better energy density in the batteries, in addition to the fact that in 2028 they will launch a battery that has as much as 50 percent higher energy density, and which will have a halved charging time, compared to what the Nissan Ariya has Today. This battery will be launched for the first time in a new fully electric SUV with three rows of seats. Here we can assume that they are referring to a 7-seater.
In addition, they will also introduce LFP batteries for cars where price is extra important.
Nissan has for a long time announced that they will be carbon neutral by 2050. It may sound like this is a very long time away, but when we previously raised this with Nissan, they answered – and explained – this in a good way. Because what does it mean to be carbon neutral? Some announce neutrality as early as 2035, but this is a bit like buying a plane ticket. Are you carbon neutral just by buying a so-called flight quota in addition to the ticket, or do we have to wait until the plane is so well developed that it actually does not emit anything? The point is easy to understand.
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Where did it go?
The Nissan Leaf is getting older, and now it’s definitely overtime. Elbil24 was a year ago in a meeting with Nissan and even then found out all the details about the car, in return for us keeping the information to Nissan said we could share it. We are still waiting to be able to share this, but it seems as if the car is postponed, almost indefinitely.
The Leaf was expected to appear at the Tokyo show last November, but it was conspicuous by its absence. And it was not even mentioned a word in today’s presentation.
We still expect it to appear before too long, in 2025 at the latest, because Nissan undeniably needs a new car in this segment. Patience is a virtue, they say.
