Nissan CEO still bullish about EVs

Carlos Ghosn recently gave a very interesting interview to The Guardian.

Head of the Renault-Nissan Alliance is still bullish about the bright future EVs, although 250,000 sales milestone falls far from his 2011 prediction of 1.5 million.

Ghosn knows the reasons why people are being relatively slow to buy EVs:

“If there is a price penalty, they just don’t buy. If there is range anxiety, they just don’t buy.”

But there is a solution! Ghosn said that at higher volume, EVs shouldn't be more expensive than conventional cars:

“This is a scale problem. The technology fundamentally has nothing expensive. If you come to the basic physics of an electric car, it is not supposed to be more expensive than a combustion engine.”

"Three to four times" more range is also coming in a “few years”, Ghosn claimed:

"“In a few years, we will have three to four times the range and the anxiety will go away,” he says. How long is a “few years”, I ask. “Maybe five to 10,” he says."

Electric cars already made a big step forward compared to 10 years ago where there was nothing on the market beside some curiosities. Now it's time for the second step:

“Ten years ago people thought that electric cars would never make it, they thought electric cars were like a golf cart, something slow, bulky, not very attractive,” he says. “Now they see the Zoe, the Leaf, the Teslas etc and they think electric cars can be fun. They see Formula E and see the cars can be very powerful and go very fast. The idea that electric cars are normal cars, which is a big revolution from 10 years ago, has taken place.”

Source: The Guardian