Nissan gears up for its electric car launch

Yesterday, car manufacturer Nissan announced plans for two new European plants that will produce lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles (EVs). One factory will be built in Sunderland, UK, and another will open in Portugal, each with a capacity to produce up to 60,000 units per annum.

Nissan is working with fellow Japanese firm NEC to improve the design of these automotive batteries, aiming for greater capacity, better durability and lower cost, in a joint venture called the Automotive Energy Supply Corporation (AESC). As one Nissan spokesperson put it: "Batteries will be a key technology - comparable with engines in today's cars. We want to own this knowledge. We don't want to become just a maker of car bodies."

Nissan has also formed an alliance with Renault, pooling resources to try to accelerate the development of electric vehicles, and the new factories will underpin EVs from both Renault and Nissan over the next few years.

Renault plans to launch three EVs in 2011, starting with two current vehicles that will be re-engineered to accommodate a battery pack and electric motor - one based on the Kangoo Express van and the other a family estate car. These will be followed later in 2011 by a bespoke electric urban car and, in 2012, by a compact hatchback EV.

Nissan is taking a different route to market. While Nissan and Renault will share battery packs, the two firms' plans differ in many other respects. Nissan plans to skip the step of modifying existing cars, for example.

"We will bring a pure EV to market at the end of 2010," says Redmer van der Meer, product manager for strategy and planning at Nissan's European base in Switzerland. "Conversions are a compromise built on a compromise - our philosophy is to start with the powertrain and to build around that."

Nissan's new electric car will be unveiled early next month and will be a C-segment (Ford Focus-sized) hatchback. "It will be a unique design - you will see immediately that it is an electric car," van der Meer says, adding that it will be the first of a range of cars in different sizes and designs.

The new car will use 20 per cent recycled materials - for example, employing a parcel shelf made from recycled plastic bottles - and will itself be 99 per cent recyclable. The main body will be steel, with some plastic and aluminium components to save weight.

A single 80kW motor under the bonnet will drive the front wheels, with the battery housed under the floor between the wheels. Van der Meer says the hub motors seen in the wheels of some electric concept cars are not mature enough for the real world of dust, dirt, kerbs and potholes. "You can't experiment with your customers," he says.

The battery itself is made up of flat laminates, each about the size of an A4 sheet of paper. Four of these lithium-ion cells are stacked in a modular container (pictured), and the modules are then assembled into a 24kWh battery delivering power at 400V. Van der Meer says using flat laminates rather than cylindrical cells helps temperature regulation, making it simpler to keep the cells within the optimum 20 to 25 Celcius range.

The new car will have no gearbox as such, just a mechanism to allow the driver to select forward, reverse, neutral and park. Top speed will be in excess of 140km/h (87mph), with acceleration equivalent to mid-tier petrol models. Driving range, assessed under the EU combined cycle regime, will be 160km or about 100 miles, according to Nissan.

That range is reached partly through regenerative braking, which can feed energy back into the battery. As a consequence, the car is likely to have a shorter range if used on dual carriageways, where sustained speed means battery demands are high and regeneration opportunities low.