Electric cars on road to zero emiss http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/electric-cars-on-road-to-zero-emissions/story-e6frg90f-1225789706753

Electric cars on road to zero emissions
Peter Alford, Tokyo correspondent From: The Australian October 22, 2009 12:00AM Increase Text Size Decrease Text Size Print Email Share Add to Digg Add to del.icio.us Add to Facebook Add to Kwoff Add to Myspace Add to Newsvine What are these?
HOW serious is Carlos Ghosn about electric vehicles? Enough to envision the Renault-Nissan alliance becoming a world force in the battery industry.

This is one answer to those who sneer at Ghosn's "electric daydreams", his betting the alliance's future on pure electric vehicle technology, on a projection that by 2020 the electricity driven proportion of world cars will reach 10 per cent.

That's between seven million and eight million new EVs a year, excluding plug-in hybrids.

Renault-Nissan and several other manufacturers will begin selling their first passenger vehicles next year.

Many of his rivals think Ghosn, president and chief executive at both Nissan and Renault, is right about the trend but wildly over-committed on timing. He shrugs their doubts aside.

"This is not a bet," Ghosn said this week, on the eve of the Tokyo Motor Show, at which Nissan will unveil new EV models for the Japanese and US markets.

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"This is a thorough analysis based on facts about what is going on in the world today, and that is why we are investing and planning for zero emissions."

What sets Renault-Nissan apart besides committing E4billion ($6.5bn) to EV research and development, he says, "is our intention to be a big player in the battery industry".

"We're not buying batteries, we're making batteries, we've developed batteries to go on the market now and we're developing batteries to go on the market in three-four years time, and by the way we're saying we're willing to sell batteries to anyone who's interested.

"We are making it a core business because we think the battery is going to be an essential piece of technology in our century. This debate (about energy storage) goes beyond the car industry, because the battery we're going to be using can have many different uses beyond fitting into a car."

When Ghosn arrived in 1999 at Nissan Motor's headquarters, then in Ginza, he found the crippled carmaker had acquired, among many other non-core activities, an aerospace division and an electric battery research centre.

In the legendary brutal clean-out that followed, the aerospace unit was peremptorily auctioned. The research centre stayed, however, "because somehow we had this intuition that one day the battery would play a role in our industry".

These days Nissan is in a battery joint-venture with NEC, but Ghosn is adamant that the cross-owned (Renault holds 44per cent of Nissan) but separately managed car companies will continue to control and drive development of the most critical piece of EV technology.

Arriving at Nissan as a 45-year-old Renault executive vice-president in 1999, Ghosn engineered a turnaround that made him a legend in manufacturing worldwide. But even before the whole industry was engulfed by the global crisis last year Nissan had been undershooting sales and profitability targets for 18 months and Ghosn was no longer immune to criticism.

His now resolute commitment to zero-emission technologies -- EVs and the fuel-cell vehicles he expects to reach commercial viability within a decade -- has only encouraged the doubters. But Ghosn says the argument about the long-term viability of conventional combustion engines is already over, although even under his scenario they will still constitute up to 90 per cent of road traffic in a decade.

The era of cheap oil is irrevocably finished, he argues. Regulatory restraints on carbon emissions will tighten into the foreseeable future, battery technology is now commercially realistic and practical for most road users, charging infrastructure is beginning to be rolled out and governments generally are willing to subsidise the transition.

The decisive factor, in Ghosn's view, is that public opinion in advanced markets is now fixed in favour of zero-emission road transport, which means in the longer run even petrol-hybrid technologies will be squeezed out.

Whether or not combustion engine emissions, responsible for 12-14 per cent of global greenhouse gases, contribute significantly to global warming is another argument he shrugs aside as irrelevant. "Societies, the public, governments are expecting us to bring the solution, that's the only fact that matters."

The clinching argument, as Ghosn tells it, is the emerging demographics of motor vehicle ownership, almost all of it coming from China, India, the Middle East, South America and Africa.

On a population growth to nine billion by 2050, and projected uptake of motor vehicles in developing countries, cars on world roads could reach twobillion.

"More than half of the world's population today doesn't have a car, dreams of having a car, and nobody's going to stop them the only (environmentally sustainable) way to do it is zero-emission technology."