Ghosn focuses alliance on EV assault

NEW YORK — Carlos Ghosn refuses to say the words "I told you so." But you know he's thinking it.

For almost a decade, Ghosn has been the industry's biggest cheerleader for electric vehicles — predicting their rise, touting the logic of their technology and suffering all the slings and arrows of critics who said he was wrong.

Ahead of his competitors, Ghosn bullishly invested $5 billion in 2010 and 2011 to build mass-market EV assembly lines and battery plants in the U.S., Europe and Japan for the two automakers he oversaw, Nissan Motor Co. and Renault.

Many in the industry shrugged off EV technology, saying consumers weren't interested. But now, automakers from BMW to Volkswagen are scrambling to electrify their vehicle portfolios. Toyota, General Motors, Ford, Daimler, Jaguar Land Rover and Volvo all have revealed big EV product plans in recent months.

"Now they come," Ghosn quips of the growing industry trend. "Everybody's coming. The reality appears more clearly to a lot of people today."

Ghosn in September unveiled a six-year business plan for the newly renamed Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, of which he is CEO, to create 12 electric models worldwide.

The 12 will be jointly developed by the alliance and sold through Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi brands. And many more models will follow those, he hints during an interview last week at the alliance's Manhattan offices.

But Ghosn believes his group has an advantage over the competitors now following him into the EV space: The alliance companies have been at it longer, with the Nissan Leaf and Renault Zoe in mass production since 2010 and 2012.

"The knowledge we have today with the Leaf or the Zoe is extremely precious," Ghosn says, "because we know how people use electric cars, what they need and what are the problems. This will allow us to prepare a much better generation of electric cars coming in the next six years.

"These 12 are not, 'This is our first venture,'" he adds. "No, no. These are cars coming to take an important position, and they will be profitable, with cost targets that are based on reputation and best of technology."

The plan will unfold in a new era of development for the three automakers. As CEO, Ghosn is pushing the alliance to step up its coordination of technology-sharing and co-development work. Another part of the six-year plan calls for much more emphasis on shared vehicle platforms and powertrains. Ghosn says that by 2022, 9 million of the three companies' vehicle sales will come from four shared platforms.

The 12 EVs of the next six years will be a group undertaking, not individual models developed separately by the alliance member companies.

"Now we're saying: One platform. One set of batteries. One set of motors," says Ghosn, who handed over his CEO title at Nissan this year but remains chairman of the automaker. "We're going to go together because our objectives are mass marketing and profitability."

The program is already underway. Ghosn has assigned a team of alliance engineers to develop a low-cost EV model for China that is based on the mini-segment Renault Kwid. Ghosn test drove the prototype in China in October. After it hits the market there in 2019, the alliance expects to export the Kwid EV to India and Brazil.

Early reports suggest the car could sell for as little as $8,000.

Ghosn admits to feeling some vindication of his original EV strategy after years of defending what looked for a time to be a product flop. The Leaf sold only about 2,500 a month in the U.S. in 2014, its best year. A second generation is just now launching.

Ghosn never wavered from his belief in EVs.

"People said, 'Yeah, but you could be wrong.' But I knew that the constraints on emissions were becoming heavier," he says. "There was no way ... we could solve all these limitations technically through gasoline engines and diesel engines or even hybrids. We needed to move to something more radical, like electric cars.

"For me it was obvious," he says of his idea, voiced in 2008, to mass-produce electrics. "And I said, the first one who was going to move in this direction was going to benefit a lot, not only in terms of brand, but in terms of the advantage of mass-marketing the electric car."