Nissan Unveils Plans for Hybrids, other Green Cars
Date: 12-Dec-06
Country: JAPAN
Author: Chang-Ran Kim, Asia auto correspondent
As part of a broad initiative called Nissan Green Program 2010 aimed at cutting carbon dioxide and exhaust emissions, Japan's second-biggest auto maker said it would offer a hybrid vehicle using internally developed technology as early as the business year starting in April 2010, first for the domestic and US markets.
The Tokyo-based auto maker has no hybrid car on the market yet. Its first will be the Altima sedan to be launched in the United States next spring using technology licensed from Toyota.
Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn has been famously lukewarm on current hybrid technology, arguing it was too expensive for consumers while reaping little or no profit for car makers.
Nissan said its own hybrid cars would balance cost and value so that they would be profitable from the start. Its licensing deal with Toyota applies only to the Altima model, and future models will likely be built using in-house technology, an official said.
Nissan said it would also develop the world's first car that can run 100 km (62 miles) on three litres of gasoline by improving the conventional internal-combustion engine, aiming for a 2010 launch in Japan.
"All these investments are a must to ensure sustained growth in the medium and longer term," Chief Operating Officer Toshiyuki Shiga told reporters at Nissan's headquarters.
"This isn't a sudden shift in strategy. We were just a bit behind in communicating what technology we possessed," he said.
Having cut back spending on research and development heavily in the late 1990s as it skirted bankruptcy, Nissan had lost its long-held cachet as the technology leader in Japan as domestic rivals Toyota and Honda rolled out the world's first gasoline-electric hybrids and hydrogen-fuelled cars during the past 10 years.
With drivers around the world growing more conscious of fuel economy and the damage their cars pose to the environment, top auto makers are stepping up their development of alternative vehicle technology while polishing their image as good corporate citizens.
Both Honda and Toyota held similar briefings earlier this year detailing medium-term goals in environmentally friendly technology. General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler AG have done the same elsewhere.
DIESELS, ETHANOL, BATTERIES
In other areas, Nissan said it would develop clean diesel engines led by alliance partner Renault SA that would meet strict emissions standards to be introduced in the United States and Japan in several years.
The partners will also launch a new 2-litre diesel engine in the first half of 2007, starting in Europe.
But Nissan said the most effective way in cushioning the environmental damage was by advancing the technology on internal combustion engines, which power most of today's cars.
To that end, Nissan said it planned to sell 1 million vehicles equipped with continuously variable transmissions (CVT) by the end of the 2007/08 business year, or around 24 percent of its global sales volume. In the 12 months to March 2006, it sold 450,000 CVT-equipped cars.
CVTs are more expensive than automatic transmissions but emit up to 10 percent less carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
Nissan said it would simultaneously accelerate development of electric vehicle technology, including gasoline-electric hybrids, plug-in hybrids, pure electric vehicles and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles.
Nissan will introduce an electric car, first in Japan and a next-generation fuel-cell vehicle in the United States and Japan, both soon after 2010, it said.
Nissan also said it was developing a new lithium-ion battery that would be manufactured and sold through a separate company that it plans to set up in the near future.
"We want to create a standard for batteries to be used in hybrids, electric and other vehicles," Shiga said, declining to divulge details of the company.
For ethanol-keen Brazil, Nissan pro
