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Nissan Motor Company said yesterday that it wants to produce electric vehicles that will be affordable and plentiful. The company hopes to infiltrate the market with mass-produced zero emission electric cars across the world starting in 2012.

The number 3 automaker in Japan, after Honda and Toyota, will unveil its first electric car on August 2^nd and begin sales of it next year. The first electric cars will be sold in Japan and the United States starting in April 2010; afterwards globally they will be produced in 2012.

In the United States, the electric cars will be produced at the Smyrna, Tennessee plant and will produce more than 100,000 units per year at the plant initially.

This comes after Nissan received a loan of over $2 billion from the United States government in an attempt to help the company produce green cars. It will also get $1.6 billion to recalibrate the Smyrna plant and another $465 to build electric vehicles and electric drive power trains in California.

Additional carmakers are also competing to manufacture and construct completely electric cars. Tesla Motors, a United States based company, wanted to have its prototype produced by 2011. Toyota has said that it wants to sell electric vehicles in the United States by 2012, like Nissan. And another Chinese automaker Dongfeng, has teamed up with a Dutch company to produce and distribute an electric car.

Nissan knows that without an affordable price tag, the car won’t sell well. The appeal of the Prius and Insight is that the cars are reasonably priced, so the electric cars will have to be the same. Mitsubishi launched the i-MiEV with a steep price tag of around $48,000 U.S. dollars and even Mitsubishi knows that the car is too expensive right now and is trying to cut the price for the future.

Of course, Nissan was hit by the recession along with all the other car companies. Nissan reported a net loss of 233.7 billion yen in the company’s fiscal year that ended in March 2009. This was the first time Nissan had sunk to an annual loss since Ghosn became the company’s CEO.

The company does plan to sell just over 3 million cars this year, but even that number is down almost 10% from the previous fiscal year.

One thing that I have never really been able to understand is why hybrid cars and electric cars have to “look” like hybrid and electric cars. In my opinion the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius look the same and they “look” like hybrid cars.

Jeremy

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