May

Nissan, NEC Investing $115M In Li-Ion Battery Factory

Posted by admin Published in Nissan

Nissan Motor Co. and technology giant NEC Corp. have joined the race to mass produce lithium ion batteries for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, saying they will invest $115 million in a factory that will produce 65,000 batteries a year by 2011.

The announcement is the strongest evidence yet that Nissan is serious about its promise to bring electric vehicles to America by 2010 and keen to dominate the emerging market for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles with vehicles like the Denkei dice concept it unveiled at the New York Auto Show.

“Nissan is determined to become a leader in that next shift in global mobility,” Carlos Tavares, the company’s executive vice president, said.

The company additionally is desperate to take the lead in so-called “next generation” green vehicles, having watched from the sidelines as Toyota sold more than a million Prius hybrids, Honda prepares to put a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the road and Johnson Controls opened the world’s first factory committed exclusively to lithium-ion batteries.

But Nissan’s got an advantage when it comes to electric vehicles.

The Nissan-NEC venture, to be called Automotive Energy Supply Corp., is supplying the batteries Renault will use in the electric cars it’s building for Israel and Denmark. The governments of those two nations

have rallied behind Silicon Valley startup Project Better Place and its plan to bring affordable EVs to the masses. Nissan is looking at a similar arrangement with the government of Japan’s Kanagawa Prefecture, which wants to develop an electric vehicle fleet and charging infrastructure. Getting a few thousand electric cars on the road before its rivals will give the joint venture a solid lead in the market.

Nissan and NEC are so confident in its technology that it plans to market its batteries to other automakers and suppliers. The joint venture says its batteries deliver twice the ability of nickel-metal hydride batteries like those used in the Prius and “have been validated to be safe, demonstrating high-performance qualities, on average runs of more than 100,000 kilometers (60,000 miles).”

Automotive Energy Supply will build the factory at Nissan’s Zama Operations Facility in Kanagawa, and says it will crank out 13,000 batteries next year. Production will ramp up to 65,000 a year by 2011. Nissan and NEC will invest $115 million in the venture by the next three years. Beyond that, NEC will spend another $105 million during the same period to mass-produce lithium-manganese electrodes.

Original post by Chuck Squatriglia