Posted on 10/03/2014 8:58:04 AM PDT by LogicDesigner
"We are getting into positive, which is good for this technology." – Carlos Ghosn After 19 months in a row of record sales in the US, the money picture for the Nissan Leaf is steadily improving. To date (well, until the end of September), Nissan has sold 63,944 Leaf EVs in the US and a total of around 140,000 globally. The company produces the electric vehicle in three countries: Japan, the UK and the US and has sold more standard passenger EVs than any other automaker. Add all that up and you get to an EV that is just about to be profitable. At least, it is according to Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Renault-Nissan, who spoke to reporters at that Paris Motor Show this week. "We are getting there [to Leaf profitability]," Ghosn told Automotive News. "Are we amortizing and depreciating everything we have spent? No. But if you look at margin of profit – the direct cost of the car and the revenue of the car – we are getting into positive, which is good for this technology."
Automakers are notoriously closemouthed when it comes to sharing specifics about the higher cost of alternative vehicle technologies compared to standard ICE vehicles. Still, statements like this – as well as a knowledge about how long it took Toyota to make money from the Prius and overall industry amortization – show that Nissan could well be sitting pretty when it comes to keeping EVs around for the long term. Given some of the other news we've heard recently, it's got to be nice to have some stability.
The Totoya Prius is a hybrid. Its a good car - combining the best advantage of the internal combustion engine - gas powered car with an electric assist battery. This technology is proven.
The Nissan Leaf on the other hand is an electric car and has more limitations than a hybrid. Its still nowhere close to being profitable.
But the big difference is the Prius is a hybrid that allows unlimited range where the Leaf is limited to about 40-60 miles between charges.
Sure, its really just a commuter car or good as a second car in a two-car household.
It might be a few years before they make a profit as a whole, including development costs. But it seems, according to this article, they they are just starting to make a profit on a per-unit basis.
Plug in vehicles? No thanks.Not in this lifetime...or the next.
If you need a longer range then a Chevy Volt would be a better fit. It is a plug-in hybrid: your first 40 miles every day would be electric and if you need to go further, it switches to a gas engine with a 340-mile gas tank.
didn’t the taxpayers build them a $1.4 billion battery factory?
You might be thinking of Tesla. Nevada gave them a tax holiday for ten or twenty years valued at $1.3 billion.
Nope.
Nissan is set to decide in a month whether to shut down the battery factory in Tenneessee which taxpayers have poured more than a billion dollars. They are thinking about buying their batteries from South Korea’s LG Chem instead.
Originally, the Prius was a hybrid because Toyota and Honda thought that was what buyers wanted. But the buyers converted the hybrids to plug-ins. So, Prius became a plug-in. Its not clear to me whether or nor Prius still makes the original Prius hybrid.
As near as what I can tell, the buyers want a 40 mile range in the electric mode for their daily commute and running errands, after which, if needed, they can fall back on the ICE.
OTOH, Musk seems to think an all electric with a 150-200 mile range for under $35,000(Tesla Model 3) will sell.
IIRC, there was a VW Rabbit diesel that got 45 MPG in 1981.
Oh, you're talking about the loan that Nissan got. Considering the healthy financial situation at Nissan, I don't think we have to worry about getting paid back on that one.
Hold on there, I'm a big plug-in fan but we need to make sure we keep the facts straight. The original Prius began sales in the U.S. in 2000 and the plug-in Prius began sales in 2012. In August, there were 818 plug-in Prius sold and 22,619 non-plug-in Prius sold.
“A few hundred” are believed to have converted their non-plug-in Prius to a plug-in.
Government should not be in the loan business, let banks do that
Of course, the purchase of their cars is subsidized by gov't tax incentives. Good for them to be hitting a profit point. Not so good for taxpayers.
Chevy Volts are not selling, a failure. My daughter has a Nissan Altima Hybrid. She gets 700 miles on a tank of gas. And it'll run in electric mode as often as needed, then switches to the gas engine, and then back again. Push the start button and immediately silently pull away, all the time. I'm really impressed by it, when you need acceleration it pulls away quickly with lots of torque and leaves other cars in the dust. She's had it seven years without problems. Nissan was selling it while getting the Leaf off the ground.
Well, with all the crap in the Middle East and Russia, maybe it is worth it to reduce our oil dependence. Besides, Nissan has sold 64,000 Leafs (Leaves?) in the U.S.; once they hit 200,000 the subsidies phase out.
Maybe so. But any analysis of a corporation’s profit on an item should recognize that their “price” is artificially depressed. At their true price, sales would be lower.
The Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf started sales at the same time, in December 2010. Nissan has sold about 64,000 Leafs and GM has sold about 69,000 Volts. Some people pick on the Volt just because Obama sat in one once.
“My daughter has a Nissan Altima Hybrid... Push the start button and immediately silently pull away, all the time. I'm really impressed by it, when you need acceleration it pulls away quickly with lots of torque and leaves other cars in the dust... Nissan was selling it while getting the Leaf off the ground.”
Yea, the Leaf and Volt are like this too. I think a lot of conservatives would be converts if they took a test drive.
No doubt. The point is to artificially boost sales in order to hasten the arrival of the day when we can put Putin, the sheiks, the mullahs, and all the other petro-tyrants of the world in the poorhouse.
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