L.A. Auto Show exclusive: Ghosn tells all (well, more) on EV plans

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In a sit-down interview with the Los Angeles Times at the L.A. Auto Show this morning, Renault-Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn spilled a few more beans on the company’s ambitious electric car plans.

Ghosn said Nissan would bring an electric car to the U.S. by 2010 and would deliver it to the ‘mass market’ worldwide by 2012. Here in the U.S., that program will start in Oregon.

According to Ghosn, the as-yet-unidentified Nissan vehicle will start with a range of 100 miles on a lithium-ion battery. But both the range and the chemical composition of the battery would probably change over time, he said, noting that the company will be working on future generations of battery technology even as it is bringing current batteries to market. ‘If you wait to have the perfect battery, you’re going to wait until 2030,’ he said.

n Israel and Denmark, where Renault-Nissan is also working on electric vehicles, the company is partnering with startup Better Place. Ghosn said today that he intended to work with that partner in other markets, saying that for EVs to work, each market needs participation from a carmaker, from the government and from what he called ‘an operator, who runs all the infrastructure.’

Ghosn said that, two years out, it was too early to tell about costs. But he said pricing would have to be competitive with non-hybrid conventional vehicles, once the cost of gasoline is taken into consideration. He explained: The electric vehicle, without the battery, would cost the same as a conventional car. Separately, the battery would be leased for a monthly fee. That fee, he said, plus the cost of electricity, would be on par with the price of a month’s supply of gasoline.

That would set the Nissan EV apart from other electric and hybrid vehicles, which have had higher price points -- sometimes much higher -- than their internal-combustion analogues. The only highway-legal EV currently available in the U.S., the Tesla Roadster, costs $109,000. GM’s Chevy Volt, though not officially priced yet, is expected to come in around $40,000 when it debuts in late 2010, about twice what a comparable mid-size sedan goes for. And Mitsubishi, which is also working on an EV for the U.S., has said it plans to sell an electric car in Japan starting next year that will cost about twice the price of the non-hybrid version of the same model.

Of course, the cost could be offset to some degree by government incentives, such as tax credits. Ghosn said that Oregon was seeking a $5,000 tax credit on EVs purchased there and that Israel was reducing the country’s 70% vehicle tax to 10% on electric cars.

-- Ken Bensinger

For more photos of production cars from the show, click here.