Nissan is a pioneer of electric vehicles, but it lost the early lead it achieved with its Leaf, and now it’s struggling to catch up to newer EV players such as Tesla or Hyundai-Kia. One way it plans to make its future EVs more popular is to sell them for less, and a company official recently announced that Nissan’s next-generation electric models will cost around 30% less to manufacture current EVs like the Leaf or the Ariya.
According to Jérémie Papin, Nissan's US CEO, quoted by Yahoo Finance, the automaker will achieve these cost savings through “simplification” and “greater commonality across many of the models.” This means there will not only be fewer components going into the construction of an electric vehicle but more of them will be shared with other models.
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Nissan needs more and better EVs
Nissan's EVs aren't currently the most desirable, although sales of the Ariya are going up, and one way to make them more attractive to buyers is by making them cheaper to manufacture and then passing on the savings to the consumer.
Papin also expects electric and electrified vehicles to reach price parity with combustion cars by the decade's end. One way Nissan could achieve this would be by ditching its plans to go all-in on solid-state batteries by 2028. However, solid-state batteries are expensive and aren't expected to go down in price enough until the self-imposed deadline (unless there's a breakthrough) to allow the manufacturer to achieve the 30% savings by adopting this new battery tech—it may continue to research lithium-ion batteries to achieve the desired savings.
Nissan is not giving up on solid-state batteries, though, and it’s setting up a pilot production facility in Japan where it plans to start experimenting with manufacturing solid-state cells and packs. Even though solid-state batteries are still considerably more expensive, Nissan believes they are the key to bringing the price of EVs down. It aims to reduce the cost per kilowatt hour to $65 by 2028.
Of the 30 new models that Nissan plans to launch by 2026, 16 will be electrified, but it didn’t say how many would be pure EVs. It needs a broader swathe of BEV models if it has any chance of competing with rival manufacturers, and a range comprised of the Leaf and Ariya isn’t enough.
The Ariya saw a 44.8% US sales increase in Q1 2024, while sales of the Leaf went down by over 50% in the same quarter. Nissan is looking to launch an electric pickup truck in the US, which is expected to arrive around the end of the decade and be a collaborative effort with Mitsubishi. Honda is another potential partner to help Nissan make more EVs.
