After BMW has now fully got behind electric cars with its new i brand, and the Volkswagen Group also now on-board with a declaration it will be the market leader of the technology by 2018, you could forgive Nissan technical chief Andy Palmer for thinking ‘I told you so’.
He was frank and open on the subject of EVs, a technology Renault and Nissan has pioneered over the last few years, most notably with the Leaf that launched back in 2010.
“As more people come to the EV market, the market will grow,” he said. “We’ve said all along that sales of these types of cars will be 10 per cent of total sales by 2020, and everyone has been giggling a bit on it. Not anymore.
“I have to give great credit to Elon Musk and Tesla for making EVs cool and desirable. We don’t share customers, but they’ve helped make EVs aspirational purchases.”
On VW, Palmer spoke candidly. “In 2011, VW said EVs were ‘lunacy’. Look it up. Now them coming into the market just validates what we’ve been saying for years.” (I did look it up, and couldn’t find that exact quote, but did find quotes from around the same time from VW’s sales boss saying consumers didn’t want EVs, only governments.)
“I’ve got four years’ worth of data on EVs and ownership patterns, and no-one else has that,” said Palmer. “We have to stay as market leader. We’re the ones who are market leaders.
“People will remember us as the ones who took the lead, and were brave enough to do it. And we will do the same with autonomous cars.”
That last statement could perhaps provide another ‘I told you so’ moment. Nissan says it will have autonomous vehicles on the market by 2020, which has prompted a series of raised eyebrows. Palmer had even brought along some articles that tried to pour cold water on Nissan’s goal, and produced them with a ‘we’ll show you’ mentality.
So why autonomous cars? “Autonomous cars are about zero emissions and zero fatalities, the latter being the key part,” according to Palmer. “An 85-year-old can get in a car, programme it to go somewhere, and get to a destination safely if legislation allows it. Autonomous cars can make calculations quickly and make quick decisions.
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It might be a good idea for
It might be a good idea for Andy Palmer to concentrate on improving the Nissan leaf before moving onto anything else..As it stands the leaf is merely an auttomotive trinket;an indulgence for people who can also afford a proper car for more serious journeys.
Issues like battery life and long term reliability are still huge unknowns,but that doesn't stop motoring journalists being won over in an afternoon.Whisked off to some foreign location to sample the latest novelty,they fall over themselves to jump onto the electric bandwagon.
As an example,Autocar recently tested the electric Ford Focus,and was ready to vouch for its reliability after only a few hours driving.
No wonder Nissan feel so smug.With such journalistic servility to encourage them,they probably do believe that the miniscule progress the leaf represented really was some kind of genuine breakthrough.
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Fantastic news re self-driving Nissans
Could spare people the tedium of driving the godforsaken things themselves.
I'm not sure about NIssan
I'm not sure about NIssan taking the lead with autonomous vehicles...Mercedes has just shown an S-Class prototype that can pretty much drive itself already, with only a few stumbling blocks remaining until it can make production (mainly legislation change, more accurate geographical maps (a problem which should be solved with Merc's recent cooperation with Nokia) and more computing power).