Overhyped. Fanciful. Simply not viable.
Skeptics have been harsh in their appraisal of Nissan’s grand plans for electric cars — which the automaker will begin putting into practice with its all-electric Leaf compact, introduced in Japan on Friday. Critics scoff at everything from the car’s limited driving range to what they consider its inflated price tag.
But Carlos Ghosn, chief executive at Nissan and its sister automaker, Renault, dismisses the scoffing as his rivals’ lack of imagination — and their envy.
“They don’t have one, so it’s not a surprise,” Mr. Ghosn said in an interview here this week at Nissan headquarters. “People who are challenged by innovation are going to fight it in the beginning,” he said.
Mr. Ghosn, whose stint running two global automakers has been so admired that the Obama administration courted him unsuccessfully last year to overhaul General Motors, is staking his reputation on what he calls the world’s first mass-produced electric car.
The Leaf, a hatchback that the Environmental Protection agency says has a range of 73 miles on a fully charged battery, will start selling later this month for $33,600, including destination charges, in selected markets in the United States. It went on sale in Japan for about $45,120, and will be introduced to European markets next year.
The Leaf is part of a bigger mission by Mr. Ghosn to redefine a brand that has been something of a laggard in green technology, a field long dominated by Toyota and its pioneering Prius gasoline-electric hybrid.
“Nissan was a ‘me too’ company,” Mr. Ghosn said. “But in electric, we’re pioneers.”
Mr. Ghosn said Nissan expected to sell at least one million units of the Leaf in its first six years — considered a model’s standard life cycle — and recoup the company’s investment within that period. In comparison, it took the Toyota Prius more than a decade from its 1997 debut to hit the one million-unit sales mark.
“We’re not selling 5,000 or 10,000 cars,” Mr. Ghosn said. “We’re talking about a massive option in the market.”
And while Mr. Ghosn acknowledged that the Leaf would not appeal to everyone, he said there was a viable target audience. “The guy who is today driving a large pickup truck, doing a hundred miles a day — if he doesn’t come buy our electric cars, it’s not a problem,” Mr. Ghosn said. “Whom we are addressing first are environmentally conscious people who drive relatively moderate distances and really want something that’s completely independent of oil.”
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