Nissan unveils US$18 billion 'Ambition 2030' electric car agenda with a Tesla Cybertruck competitor
Nissan just started taking reservations for its Ariya electric SUV priced at US$46,000, but the Japanese carmaker is not stopping here, it seems. Not to be outdone by its rivals, the maker of the Nissan Leaf, one of the first commercially available electric cars, just unveiled a comprehensive US$17.6 billion electrification plan. Dubbed "Ambition 2030," the program aims to release no less than 23 "electrified" vehicles by that year, including 15 new fully electric models across the Nissan and INFINITY brands. Besides the Nissan Ariya that is already a fact, the company has a few concepts lined up to hit the conveyor belts:
- Nissan SURF-OUT - a Tesla Cybertruck electric pick-up competitor;
- Nissan CHILL-OUT crossover EV;
- Nissan MAX-OUT sports convertible;
- Nissan HANG-OUT family EV that "changes the perception of mobile space."
Nissan's electric car strategy includes battery investments as well. The company aims to reduce the current lithium batteries' costs in the span of the "Ambition 2030" project, as well as have a solid state battery
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 30 2021, @02:51AM (1 child)
To be consistent, it must become BLOW-OUT.
(Score: 4, Funny) by coolgopher on Tuesday November 30 2021, @03:37AM
There'll still be petrol/diesel models I'm sure, as part of the HOLD-OUT range.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 30 2021, @02:53AM (1 child)
At least these won't have no (in)famous Nissan mechanical transmission.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday November 30 2021, @05:16AM
Please do not change my perception of mobile space. I do not want a mobile living room.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Insightful) by deimtee on Tuesday November 30 2021, @06:12AM
... one without all the tracking, touch-screens, auto-pilot, OTA updates, bluetooth, and other bullshit. A radio that works on actual FM radio signals. A GPS that doesn't constantly report back where I am while playing "locally relevant" ads at me. A car that I own, not just "license" from some invasive arseholes. One that doesn't have a sim card, let alone a data allowance.
Until then, I'll keep driving my CO2 spewing, 4 litre, V6, with stick-on Garmin, push-button radio and cassette player. I also have a nice "new" sound unit that can play CD's and USB sticks. I might someday get around to installing that. When the tapes wear out.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday November 30 2021, @06:27AM
Because electric drivetrains have so much energy to spare, why bother making the vehicle aerodynamic in any way?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MostCynical on Tuesday November 30 2021, @06:54AM (1 child)
so.. does the $18 billion total include new factories, all the costs of production of all the new models, the new batteries, and amortization and depreciation on the lot?
if not, how is that number so large?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday November 30 2021, @12:13PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 30 2021, @01:27PM
i wonder if they'll be using mostly green energy input to make this happen?
i mean, like a car threadmill, where they place the e-car and gun the electric engine and pipe the threadmill output into their ...uhmm...errr.... carframe steel smelting furnance?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 30 2021, @02:22PM (4 children)
That's an ambitious sum for an ambitious plan. Let's hope it spurs other carmakers to follow suit.
I wonder if 2030 won't be years too late to achieve pole position in the EV market, though. Tesla has been heavily re-investing its profits to build capacity, but that phase won't last forever. Eventually they'll get the throughput they figure they need and start moving aggressively to flip the current market share on its head.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 30 2021, @05:18PM
Irrelevant: they'll end up being a cryptocurrency exchange and eventually spin off their EV subsidiary to someone else.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday December 01 2021, @03:37PM (2 children)
Let's hope it spurs other carmakers to follow suit.
THEY are the followers, not the leaders. Both Ford and Chevy are already manufacturing fully electric vehicles, Ford has an electric pickup they advertise as being able to power your house in a blackout. Chevy has said they're going 100% electric.
For me, helping the environment would be nice but my electricity comes from burning coal until they finish that solar farm, but I decided that my next car would be electric after buying a battery powered lawnmower and realizing there's no annual oil change, no annual cleaning the air filter, no driving to the gas station to fill a container with carcinogens. That's when I thought about the fact that ICE engines have pumps, gears, valves, a crankcase, transmission, coolant, and EVs don't. There are thousands of moving parts in an ICE engine, only one in an electric motor. Almost no maintenance, just like my lawnmower.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 01 2021, @04:31PM (1 child)
Nissan came out with the Leaf a long time before Ford and Chevy got serious, so they have something of a claim to being a leader in the EV space. It's a minor quibble, though.
You don't have to care about the environment at all to want an electric car. You covered several of the points, ease of use, lower maintenance, less hassle. I'd add that they drive better and quieter. With an ICE, there are gearing shifts and delays. With an EV, the response is instantaneous, linear, and precise.
They accelerate better, too; I may have told this anecdote on Soylent before, but last summer a guy ahead of me at the stop light was revving his Dodge Charger. I was behind him in a plug-in hybrid minivan, so for shits and giggles when he took off at the green I hugged his back bumper while his engine screamed and screamed trying to get away. He was in a muscle car, and I was in a freakin' minivan. I only relented because I glanced at my speedometer and realized we were doing 70 in a 40mph zone. He kept going for a half mile, though, in order to "win." Man, did I laugh and laugh.
And then there's the quiet. Some people really thrill to the sound of a screaming engine, but I like the idea of a silent assassin. No fanfare, no ostentation, just summary and total domination.
We switched our lawn care equipment to electric like you did, too, and it's great to have the lawnmower so quiet that it doesn't wake anyone up in the house.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday December 01 2021, @06:10PM
Most people don't realize that electric motors have the most torque at 0 rpm, which is why freight trains have have deisel generators running electric motors. I've read the Tesla does 0-60 in 3 seconds.
Of course they should handle better than ICE because of the low center of gravity.
As to quieter, all new cars are quiet today. I live on a busy street and the only engines I hear is big trucks and old cars; what you mostly hear is the tires "like waves on the beach" as the Doors song puts it. But once that muffler that EVs don't have starts rusting...
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Tuesday November 30 2021, @07:17PM (18 children)
US$75 is about AU$100.
If they can do that, they will be able to sell shitloads of those batteries to people who have solar power. Add three grand for batteries and most aussie homes that have solar could go off grid. I looked into it, and the point where it was economical was if batteries got under AU$200 per KWh, with a lifetime of at least five years.
The Tesla Powerwall is over $1000, lead-acid and Ni-Fe both come in at about $500 ~ $600, none of them are worth it.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 30 2021, @10:54PM (6 children)
How did you arrive at those conclusions?
Door-to-door salespeople have come, many times, to try to persuade us to upgrade our 1970s single pane windows. Every time, I sent them packing. Their proposals were in the neighborhood of $10,000, and they claimed savings of as much as 50% on our heating and cooling costs. So, I went through our data and concluded our cost to heat and cool was roughly $700 per year. Also, the 50% savings was unlikely, and 25% might be a more realistic max. Probably even less than that, because we had drapes. So, at most $175 saved per year. Assuming an interest rate of 0%, that works out to 57 years to pay off that $10,000. I haven't decided the longest pay back period I can tolerate, but 57 years is way, way too long. Maybe 10 to 15 years. So that puts the price I'm willing to pay for a window upgrade at roughly $2000.
The thinking is similar for solar and battery electric vehicles. Drive 10,000 miles per year, gas is, well, the price is all over the place, but for the sake of simplicity, let's say $1 of gas gets you 10 miles. So $1,000 per year to drive a gas burner. Should factor in that they are higher maintenance, maybe $200 more per year? An electric car might get 3 miles on 1kWh of electricity, and that costs in the vicinity of 10 cents. So, $333 per year to drive the battery electric. Supposedly, the rooftop solar could reduce that to $0.
Which leaves environmental reasons as the main reason to do it, until battery prices come down lots more.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by damnbunni on Wednesday December 01 2021, @02:02AM (1 child)
The main reason I want an electric car is that I'm an antisocial hermit who doesn't want to go anywhere I don't HAVE to go, and not having to stop at a gas station ever again is worth it.
The fact that because the car market is so screwed up right now that I can trade my gasoline car for a very lightly used electric one at the same payment is also nice. I've got a car reserved.
Electrics cost more to register ($100 per year 'you ain't payin' gas taxes' fee) and to insure (batteries are expensive to replace) though.
But yeah, unless you drive around town a lot (most gas cars have considerably worse city milage than highway), they won't save much money.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday December 01 2021, @05:10PM
Social butterflies also could do with never having to refuel.
Recharging at home is a big plus, yes. Indeed, from owning a used Leaf for a couple of years now, I've learned that you never want to use a public charging station, if that is at all possible to avoid. Too many times, I've been burned trying to use one. Recharging is slow, stations aren't common enough, and, incredibly, aren't reliable. They may be behind a gate. May be turned off after 5P. May be occupied. At the ones that demand payment, which is most of them, you can't just insert a credit card, like you can at a gas pump. Have to have an account set up with whichever of the half dozen or so networks owns that charging station. I've had a supposedly working station blame my car for being "not ready" to charge. Had to wait for another station to free up, and use that one instead. Another time, I was stuck using my wall outlet charger, when I got to a charging station that had been shut off for the night. At least there was a working wall outlet. If it hadn't been for that, I would have had to spend the night in my car, waiting for them to turn the station back on when they opened next morning. As it was, I still had to wait an hour and a half to recharge to the point I thought I could make it home with some juice to spare, just in case.
Because the process is so horribly slow, charging stations have to be more ubiquitous than gas pumps. A charging station at every corner is no good. They need to be at every parking lot, so you can recharge while you are busy with whatever you are doing at your destination. I'm not at all sure it's practical to build that many charging stations. Or, battery electrics need lots more range. Or our cities less sprawled.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday December 01 2021, @05:01AM (1 child)
Similar maths, but I wasn't including an electric car. It was purely about replacing domestic power bills. Solar is worth it now (here in AU) but batteries at the current price are not. At AU$200/KWh the payback (for me) was about 6 years, which is also about the expected lifetime of lead-acid. You have to work it out on your own usage/costs/fault tolerance etc. There is also a step in the value calculations where your system becomes good enough to cut out the supply charge too.
Similar reasoning to yours is why my current car is a 4 litre V6 sedan. It is way more car than I need, but I looked at the price of petrol, how many km I drove and the price difference compared to small "eco-friendly" cars. At any interest rate at all the payback for paying extra for less car was infinite.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday December 01 2021, @05:28PM
Many years ago, I tried a low end UPS, capable of providing power for 15 minutes. It did save me from one power outage, once. But It would have been no big deal if power had been lost. Not like I was running a database server, just an ordinary desktop with a journaling file system. I soon found out that every 2 years actually is too often to have to bother dealing with replacing the degraded battery. On the way to the battery store, a kid ran a red light, right in front of me as I was entering the intersection. The old battery was lost, I think left behind in my wrecked car that got towed off for scrap. The accident aside, I felt UPS just wasn't worth it. Surge protector, yes. UPS, no.
I have read that nickel iron batteries are very long lasting. Of course that comes with downsides. They are among the worst when it comes to efficiency. They will put out only about 50% of the energy that goes in, an they don't hold a charge for a long period. The use case scenario has to be one in which you have a solar array that produces quite a bit more power than you use, and which would otherwise just be lost.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday December 01 2021, @03:44PM (1 child)
The only trouble with your math is that you made up all the numbers.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday December 01 2021, @05:40PM
No, actually, I did not make up the numbers. I have decades of utility bills which I used to estimate these costs. Used the difference in energy use between mild months in spring and fall to the rest of the months, to estimate the energy that went to heating and cooling. Sure, I don't imagine energy use for other things is perfectly even throughout the year, but I thought it close enough. $1400 per year was what we spent on electricity and gas towards the end when I had finally made significant progress on reducing our energy usage, thanks to compact fluorescent lighting, 80plus PC power supplies, replacing tubes with flat screens, and other such measures. We used roughly 10,000 kWh per year through the 1980s and 1990s, and by 2010, I had that down to 5200 kWh.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday December 01 2021, @12:25AM (3 children)
Yeah at that cost getting batteries would be a no-brainer even for me here in the city where I have (surprisingly) reliable power. Get those batteries in and my only electricity cost should be daily supply charge, except for the darkest bits of winter.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Wednesday December 01 2021, @04:45AM (2 children)
I was basing it on cutting the cord completely. No supply charge. The average household usage is about 20 KWh / day.
It depends on how tolerant you are of managing low power. My setup would be something like 40 KWh of storage (three days of my usage) and an oversupply of four or five KW of solar panels. The more storage, the less panels and vice versa, so the exact mix would depend on the prices at the time. If you've got a suitable spot for one, domestic windmill generators [duckduckgo.com] look very interesting too.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday December 01 2021, @06:11AM (1 child)
Being inner city I'm limited to ~4kW solar PV by available roof space. In winter it's far from enough to break even as the solar only ends up generating 0-3kWh/day and my usage is 10-15kWh/day.
Having batteries would allow me to timeshift my grid power however, so I'd save by purchasing from the grid at off-peak rather than peak rates.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by deimtee on Wednesday December 01 2021, @02:10PM
That works for now, in fact batteries are borderline viable now. But, I would expect them to remain borderline viable.
If the price of batteries drops so will the difference between peak and off-peak charges.
I think the power companies are facing a bleak future. If they raise the connection charge, more people will go off grid. If they raise rates more people put in solar. If the diff between P and OP gets too large, people will power-shift or put in batteries. As the price of batteries and solar slowly drop it squeezes them more and more. Their recourse is likely to be legislative - they will be lobbying to make it illegal to disconnect from the grid. Expect large increases in connection charges as soon as they sneak that through.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 01 2021, @02:19PM (1 child)
We just had a solar array installed on our place last week, with a Tesla Powerwall as the battery. Our car is a plug-in hybrid (2017 Chrysler Pacifica) we bought used a couple years ago; apart from a couple road trips out West, we have only filled the tank twice because 99.5% of our trips are purely on the battery. The solar array is spec'd well above what our normal power needs are, but we'll see if it can cover our vehicle needs, too.
After rebates on the solar system we figure our break-even is 8 years. It's not bad, but I'm also figuring it will add to the value of the house. If energy prices spike the way industry watchers are predicting, then our break-even will accelerate.
More than financial concern for me is peace of mind. The New York area has had more than a couple extended blackouts and outages in the last 15 years, and that's without supply chain disruptions or coronavirus policies. Being able to get around and run our house if the grid goes down (again) is quite attractive.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday December 01 2021, @06:39PM
I'm in AU. Tesla Powerwalls here cost about AU$8000 (about $6000 US). They don't make economic sense except in highly contrived circumstances. Even then deep-cycle lead-acid would usually beat them.
If you just assumed that, you might get a nasty shock. Most battery systems shut down and disconnect when the grid power goes out. You have to pay extra and get a special isolating setup to keep running. They don't want your battery trying to power the neighborhood or electrocuting repairmen.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday December 01 2021, @03:42PM (4 children)
$75 per kWh? My lawnmower battery holds 10 kWh, so by your numbers its battery should cost $750. I paid $650 for the kit and kaboodle, mower, battery, charger, and it's a convertible self-propelled mower, not some cheap shit.
Somebody's numbers are way off.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday December 01 2021, @06:29PM (3 children)
10 KWh or 10AH ?
There is a big difference. The Tesla Powerwall only holds about 7 KWh and it masses 114kg (250 lb).
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday December 02 2021, @07:27AM
Correction to the above. The difference depends on the mower voltage. If it is operating on 1000V then they are the same. If, as seems more likely, the mower voltage is lower then the difference is a factor of V/1000.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday December 02 2021, @03:26PM (1 child)
The documentation says kWh.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday December 03 2021, @12:23AM
If it actually is 10KWh, you got an incredible deal - a 10 KWh battery from Amazon is over $7000 [amazon.com] People would be buying those things and throwing the rest away just to get cheap batteries. Also, even with state of the art lithium you would be looking at around 100kg of battery. See the specs on this [osmbattery.com]
Sad to say, I think the documentation is lying to you. If you can see the battery, see if it has an AH rating printed on it. Total energy is just AH x Voltage.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.