Renault and Nissan are ready to leap head-first into making electric vehicles for the many. At the very least, Renault/Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn, is willing to make some Lutzian-style statements. I suppose, following this weekend's public EV demonstration in Israel, it gets easier to promise that the companies would launch "a range of electric cars" in the U.S in 2010 (Europe's time will come in 2011). We've been expecting at least one EV from Renault or Nissan to be brought to market somewhere around that time frame, but a whole range in two years? That's ambitious. Not totally unexpected, but no less ambitious. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this. A range does need to start with at least one vehicle, right? In any case, Californians will get first crack at the Renault/Nissan EV, which Ghosn described as not "a Star Wars prototype. It will be a car for sale."
Renault has been making a lot of EV moves recently. A week ago, Ghosn said that Nissan will become a global leader in affordable electric vehicles, and we've of course been following Renault's emerging partnership with Project Better Place (see demonstration link, above). A less flashy but just as vital part of the puzzle will come from the Automotive Energy Supply Corp partnership between Nissan and NEC-JV, which will start mass producing li-ion automotive batteries next year. So, everything is moving in the right direction for Renault and Nissan; now if someone would just tell Ghosn that there's at least one person (me) who would be totally in favor of an electric car that looks like it belongs in Star Wars.
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