Nissan's Zero Worship

Above, you can see the business end of a Nissan Leaf, the 100-mile-per-charge, all-electric car that Nissan will begin selling next year (the charging ports are located right between the headlights). I attended a sunsplashed media even in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium today (read: it was toasty hot, even for November). Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s (and Renault’s) CEO was on hand to introduce the Leaf as part of Nissan’s “Zero Emissions” tour, which will take the car from West Coast to East Coast over the next few months.

Regardless of how you feel about EVs and the future, Ghosn’s commitment to Leaf is intriguing. I asked Scott Becker, Nissan’s Senior VP for Administration and Finance, if Leaf had become Ghosn’s baby, in the same way that the Chevy Volt is close to GM’s Bob Lutz’s heart. Becker said that could be a bit of a stretch and that Ghosn is determined to lead Nissan forward as a company, not just see it as one vehicle.

With the Leaf, Ghosn is actually trying to make a business case not just for EVs, but for pressing toward zero emissions (hence the name of the tour). Because the Leaf burns no gas, it emits nothing. As environmental requirements for cars and their emissions become more stringent over the coming decades, zero-emissions vehicles are going to become a larger part of automakers’ fleets. And as far as Ghosn is concerned, there’s an excellent case to be made for leading the pack right now.

Nissan also wants to reduce emissions across its entire fleet, as Becker maintained when I asked him about Nissan cars and trucks that aren’t 100-percent EVs. Ultimately, this may be more significant, because if you’re a carmaker with an EV hitting the market, proclaiming zero emissions, you’re not going to want the rest of your vehicles to be tarred as pollution-wagons. For the time being, however, Nissan is keeping its mega-SUV, the Armada, around.

As I’ve pointed out before, there’s a potential advanced-mobility smackdown brewing in 2010 between the Leaf and Chevy’s Volt, a vehicle that runs on electricity, that that can also call up a small gas engine to serve up much greater range than the Leaf when the juice runs out. The folks at Nissan and General Motors don’t see a battle royale on the horizon, but with both cars vying for attention, the comparisons will be inevitable. Nissan does think it has an advantage on price, as the Leaf will should cost around $25,000, with a leasing deal for the (expensive) battery. The Volt will probably be priced between $30-40,000, but GM could easily decide to come in closer to $30,000, losing money in order to establish its new hybrid technology in the marketplace.

Nissan is also up against a adoption problem: even optimistic predictions for EV penetration only have them making up 10 percent of the global market by 2020. And that doesn’t necessarily figure in a massive infusion of cheap internal-combustion cars, like Tata’s sub-$3,000 Nano.

I’ve posted video from the Leaf event below (apologies for any shakiness, I was getting dehydrated), and I Twittered the whole thing at @mattdebord. I tried to get Ghosn on tape, but local TV media is brutal! Enjoy.

UPDATE: Best quotes from Ghosn: "The Leaf must make money, because if it doesn’t, the technology is condemned." Well, there you go. Please make money, Leaf! Also, in an exchange with a sassy British journalist, who insisted that electric cars must be sexy: ”You don’t find this car sexy?"