Nissan Motor Co will spend $17.6 billion on electric vehicles within five years. Subscribe to Electric Vehicle News Bitesize Podcast for FREE!

Nissan Motor Co. said on Monday that it plans to spend $17.6 billion in the next five years to add 20 new battery-powered cars to its product line.

The company hopes to regain its place in the electric car race after the Leaf EV was first introduced more than a decade ago. Investors have pushed up the stock prices of automakers that are betting on electric vehicles, including relatively new companies such as Tesla Inc. and industry giants such as Ford Motor Company and Volkswagen.

“We are 10 years ahead of our competitors in electrification,” said Makoto Uchida, Nissan’s CEO. The company plans to invest twice its investment in electric vehicles in the next five years.

Mr. Uchida said that he hopes that daily production capacity will shift from gasoline vehicles to electric vehicles first, but he is cautious about setting sales targets for electric vehicles. Under the leadership of former leader Carlos Ghosn (Carlos Ghosn), Nissan and its partner Renault SA RNO 1.48% promised to sell 1.5 million electric vehicles by 2016, but they are still far from achieving this goal.

We must pay close attention to the evolution of the global market,” said Mr Uchida.

Nissan Motor said of the 20 new cars introduced by 2026, 9 of them will be pure battery-powered vehicles. Other models include Nissan’s petrol-electric hybrid, which is a vehicle powered by an electric motor, but equipped with a small petrol engine to charge the battery while driving.

At present, the sales of electric vehicles are often driven by government regulation. Nissan’s chief operating officer Ashwani Gupta (Ashwani Gupta) said that with the advancement of technology behind the car, this situation will change. “Advances in electric platforms, power systems, and battery technology will push the tipping point for electric vehicle adoption,” Mr. Gupta said.

In the United States, the Biden administration recently issued an executive order aimed at making electric vehicles account for half of all new car sales by 2030. Nissan said on Monday that it expects pure electric or hybrid vehicles to account for 40% of its US sales. Mr. Uchida said he could not provide breakdown data by model.

Nissan is working to remove expensive materials such as cobalt from its electric car batteries to reduce the cost to US$75 per kilowatt-hour. This will be 65% cheaper than the current generation Leaf launched in 2017.

In addition, Nissan has invested more than US$1 billion in solid-state batteries and will replace the liquid electrolyte currently used in lithium-ion batteries with solid-state batteries. Nissan said that this technology makes the battery lighter and safer. The automaker’s goal is to put its version into production by 2028.

Nissan said it is expanding its global battery production capacity to power these new cars. The goal is to produce approximately 52 GWh of batteries by 2026. The company’s plants in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan currently produce approximately 7.5 GWh per year.

As consumers switch to battery-powered cars, demand for lithium is expected to exceed global supply. As China is currently taking the lead in processing important raw materials, the US government is seeking to increase domestic production.

Nissan was founded in 1911, initially by Hashimoto Masujiro under the name of Aoishinsha Automobile Factory. Three years later, the company produced the first car DAT, which is an acronym for the last names of three investment partners. Nissan went through several name changes in the 1920s, and it was not until 1934 that Nissan Motor Company was first used.

A company called Nihon Sangyou or Japan Industries merged with Nissan Motor Company in 1931. Yoshisuke Aikawa, CEO of Nihon Sangyou, was excited about starting the company’s automotive division, so when the other shareholders were less enthusiastic, Aikawa bought them and began to focus on building a Nissan manufacturing plant.

Nissan continues to produce the Datsuns that they have been producing for many years, as well as the trucks and airplanes they have produced for the Japanese army. After the war, Nissan worked with a number of automakers to build cars for them, including the Austin Motor Company in the 1950s and 1960s and the merger with Prince Motors in 1966, which introduced cars into the Nissan product line that is still in production today.

Due to the anti-communist sentiment after the end of the Korean War, 1953 was a dramatic moment in Nissan’s history. The Nissan Trade Union took drastic measures and fired hundreds of workers and even arrested union leaders. Eventually, a new union was formed to help Nissan expand rapidly in technology.

Nissan began to expand globally in the late 1950s, when it realized that the small Datsun would fill the gap in the Australian and American car markets. Nissan showed off the car at the Los Angeles Auto Show in 1958 and opened a subsidiary in the United States in 1960. A factory was established in the UK in 1986, and by 2007 the annual output exceeded 400,000 vehicles, making it the most productive factory in Europe. Nissan also has a factory in Brazil, and its cars are sold all over the world. Nissan is particularly popular in China, with sales of more than 500,000 vehicles in China in 2009.

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