The inside story of the Nissan Leaf price

[wtmusic]

"With all of the reveals and partnership announcements here at the New York Auto Show the most important thing we've heard is a number: $25,280. That's the price that Nissan said yesterday it will sell the Leaf for when it goes on sale later this year (full production starts in 2011), and it's much lower than rumors we've heard from competitors in the plug-in vehicle space. We sat down with Mark Perry, Nissan's director of product planning, to talk about this price – how it came to be, what the reaction has been, etc. – because we're pretty sure readers would like to know more details about Nissan's strategy.

Perry was all smiles when he talked about how Nissan got to the $32,780 price – of course, the headline is that this turns into $25,280 after $7,500 worth of federal tax credits – and we understand why. He told us that this price is the result, in part, of 17 years of work Nissan has done on lithium-ion batteries. By doing everything in-house for so many years, Nissan doesn't need to charge the customer for battery research like other companies that are freshly bursting into the electric vehicle (EV) market and are just now figuring out how to make EVs that work. Plus, by spreading the research and development over many years, selling the Leaf for just under $33,000 allows the company to make a profit off the car, or at least minimizes early losses."

Audio interview at link.

http://green.autoblog.com/2010/03/31/new-york-2010-the-inside-story-of-the-nissan-leaf-price/

Highlights:
• Nissan makes their own Li-ion batteries, and has been working on them since 1993 - two years after the first one was introduced by Sony. GM, where were you?
• Will come in two versions, the "SV" and "SL". SL package, for $940 extra, includes a solar panel on the spoiler (I think I'll pass :silly:)
• Accepting reservations for $99 down, beginning on April 20.

[dmallind]

1. Sounds good. Should get lots of buyers at that point

Relatively affluent two income/two car families could easily justify this as an everday commuter keeping the IC car for occasional trips and long distance needs. I'm not going to be buying any more cars personally but if I were that setup would be very tempting indeed.

[wtmusic]

2. I'm hoping this will be my next car.

In CA it's very affordable, and my current car is dying.

It depends on whether there will be a dealer markup on the car above MSRP, which could easily put it out of my range.

[dmallind]

3. Probably will first year. At least first months

All new and exciting cars have that. For the Prius it lasted years. I would not be surprised if it doesn't again.

[tinrobot]

24. Definitely on my list, but I may wait a year.

I think you're right in that prices may be higher than retail for a while.

Besides, I'd like to see what other electric cars coming out in the next year or so will cost.

[amborin]

4. the price is also the result of Nissan's anti-UAW organizing, union-busting tactics

such as illegally bussing workers from other plants to Nissan's Smyrna plant to vote no in the UAW's organizing vote

workers need EFCA, but that's been

gutted:rant:

[wtmusic]

5. Do you have a link to that?

Thanks

[amborin]

6. a link to what?

[wtmusic]

7. "illegally bussing workers from other plants"

[amborin]

8. yes, many links

[wtmusic]

9. Wonderful

Um, could you provide them? :crazy:

[amborin]

10. here

is one

no time now to look them up

2001: NLRB took legal action against Nissan

Nissan tried to manipulate the Smyrna vote by busing in workers at remote plants......(UAW News 2001)

also

saltzman 1995


Muller, Joann, Kerwin, Kathleen and David Welch 2002 “Autos: A New Industry” Business Week July 15, 2002: 98.

[wtmusic]

11. Not going to do your research for you.

You can provide a fucking link, and a quote, to support your argument. Standard procedure. :eyes:.

[amborin]

12. hey---how about thanks for my research FOR YOU! I provided 3 links and you diss this?

[wtmusic]

14. Um, no.

Those aren't links, those are sources.

A link is something I can click on and go directly to a source. A quote is an excerpt from that source so I don't have to hunt through hundreds of pages of legal documents to possibly find out you're full of shit.

I don't know how long you've been here, but that's the way it works. Without links and quotes, your argument is worthless.

[amborin]

17. they are references; you can easily find them; and your rudeness is noted

[wtmusic]

18. Did you ever write any kind of research paper?

It is considered the obligation of the person stating an opinion or drawing conclusions to back them up explicitly. Things are a little bit more lax around here, but you can expect any educated person to ignore you if you don't follow that protocol.

This is something that's typically taught in 8th grade. I don't fault people for ignorance if they're willing to learn, but I will fault them for being ignorant and stubborn.

[amborin]

19. you clearly haven't ever written a research paper or you'd recognize references

[amborin]

20. you ignored and dissed the references i provided

[wtmusic]

22. Actually I'll be ignoring the references AND ignoring you

and I don't mean any disrespect. :hi:

[amborin]

21. the real problem is you don't like the evidence of nissan's union-busting

[kristopher]

23. Your claim is horseshit; if you haven't the desire for the truth, that is on your head.

With google it is a snap. When you pull that "You have to have a link" crap you are obviously just being wrongheaded.

[amborin]

28. thanks, Kristopher; the links were very easy to find

http://uaw.org/news/newsarticle.cfm?ArtId=53

"UAW Wins Key NLRB Decision Regarding Nissan
The Memphis Regional Director of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled against Nissan on September 7, 2001, in a decision that also directed a union election for the workers at Nissan’s Smyrna assembly plant. The decision denies Nissan’s attempt to dilute the voting strength of the Smyrna plant workforce by including voters in the election from a separate Nissan facility 80 miles away whose workers had not petitioned for an election.

Specifically the decision said in part, “I conclude that the petitioned for unit, limited to employees at the Smyrna facility is an appropriate unit for purposes of collective bargaining.”

“We hope that Nissan managers who introduced this phony issue in the first place, don’t now take steps to delay the setting of the earliest possible election date,” said Chet Konkle a member of the Volunteer Organizing Committee. “We want a vote as soon as possible, because a majority of Nissan workers want more of a say about their jobs and we know that a union is the best way to get it.”

“A lot of us have been waiting for this chance for a long time,” said Mike Williams, a member of the Nissan Volunteer Organizing Committee and a leader of the 1989 unionization effort at Nissan. “Nissan management has told many workers they want a quick election, and we hope they don’t go back on their word by trying to delay this vote.”
"

http://uaw.org/news/newsarticle.cfm?ArtId=62

"UAW Comments on Nissan Vote
Calling today’s loss at Nissan a “setback for Nissan workers,” UAW President Stephen P. Yokich said, “the fact remains that in the global economy, Nissan workers still need and deserve the seat at the decision-making table that only a union can provide. That’s why Nissan workers and other workers can continue to count on the UAW’s support in their efforts to unionize and build brighter futures for themselves and their families.”

“Obviously we’re disappointed that the UAW supporters at Nissan came up short in this election after working so hard and standing up to Nissan’s intense anti-union campaign,” Yokich continued. “Yet, at the same time, we’re proud of the courage and determination they displayed throughout.”

“Make no mistake about it," Yokich added, "this vote does not change the constructive relationships we have with Ford, GM, DaimlerChrysler, NUMMI, Mitsubishi and hundreds of other employers that contribute every day to keeping our middle-class economy strong.”

Commenting on the result, Bob King who heads the union’s Organizing Department, added, “our experience tells us that campaigns like this exert tremendous pressure on employers to maintain higher wages and better benefits for their workers than would otherwise be the case. Whether they know it or not, every Nissan technician owes a debt to the brave Nissan workers who campaign for the union. They are protecting every Nissan worker’s standard of living.”

“There can be no doubt,” King continued, “that Nissan management’s law breaking and campaign of fear and intimidation offers dramatic proof of the tremendous obstacles workers must overcome in the face of a hostile employer.”

“Most people think that union elections are just like the votes American citizens all know for elected officials and ballot propositions,” King explained. “Unfortunately, that is not the case. In this election and in far too many union elections, employers threaten workers with loss of jobs, plant closings, moving to Mexico, loss of wages and benefits, and many other threats. Moreover, unlike political elections where all sides have comparable access to the voters, in union elections, the employer has unlimited workplace access to the workers while unions have no workplace access to workers.”

“Nissan set the wrong tone for this campaign early on,” King said, “when plant manager Daniel Gaudette told workers in an in-plant video message that they should not even talk to UAW supporters. The company also conducted extensive illegal surveillance of Nissan workers who were engaged in leafleting and other pro-union activities in and around the plant. Furthermore, Nissan workers who were perceived by the company as undecided were forced to attend compulsory meetings, often repeatedly, where they were barraged with distorted, misleading and just plain wrong information about the UAW. Every Nissan technician was subjected on a daily basis to company disinformation about everything from Nissan’s relationship with unions in other countries to the basics of Nissan benefits and company policies.”

“That kind of behavior is just plain wrong,” Yokich said.

“We applaud not only the workers for their courageous and positive campaign,” King said, “we thank the religious leaders; the Nashville area community activists who tried to persuade Nissan to agree to a debate on the issues; sports leaders like Frank Wycheck and Gene Upshaw; scores of academics from colleges and universities who signed statements calling for a fair campaign and the trade unionists from throughout Tennessee, the nation and the world who supported this organizing effort. We are confident that all will remain supporters as we bring the story of this election and Nissan’s treatment of its workers here at its Tennessee plants to the attention of the public in the weeks and months ahead.” "

[amborin]

13. just incredible! i provide links and quotes & you dismiss factual evidence of nissan's union-bustin

you're clearly angry that the facts and evidence are there, big and bold

[NNadir]

15. The car will appear "cheap" until someone tries to make 50 million of them.

Nobody's actually talking about that.

Even if someone made 50 million of them, they would not put a dent, even a small dent, into the environmental disaster represented by the close to one billion cars now on the toxic roadways.

[wtmusic]

16. They claim the car is profitable at that price

and replacing 1 out of every 5 ICE cars in the US with an electric one would make a considerable dent in emissions, especially if the electricity comes from carbon-free sources.

Eliminating passenger cars worldwide will never, ever happen. So we're left with doing the best we can with cars - or giving up.

[Statistical]

25. Even if the power comes from coal it is still emits less CO2 than any internal combustion engine.

The sad reality is internal combustion engines are insanely off the charts inefficient.
DOE estimate the tank to wheel efficiency for average passenger vehicle is 15%.

We don't what the plug-wheel efficiency for Nissan Leaf is but most EV are 85%-90% efficient.

15% vs 85%+ that is something internal combustion can never overcome. Now EV have the inefficiency of transmission and actual power generation but even from fossil fuels they emit far less than any internal combustion vehicle.

100% COAL POWERED Electric Vehicle still emits less CO2 than a Prius. Of course the goal wouldn't be coal powered cars but our current power grid is makes EV far less emitting than the most efficient internal combustion engine.

I will show the math in a separate thread later (if anyone is interested). That is too much to try and do at work.

[wtmusic]

26. I'm interested, I've seen several analyses

and that sounds about right.

I've gotten bogged down in Argonne Lab's GREET spreadsheet several times, but W2W there are too many assumptions to draw general conclusions (you can kinda tweak it to tell you what you want to hear).

[Statistical]

27. Sure. I'll post them later. I ran some numbers for another forum so I already have them n/t

[NNadir]

29. I don't actually agree with the last statement, and I'm not giving up on my claim.

I am not convinced either that replacing 1 out of every 5 cars with electric cars will happen or can happen.

I believe that it is entirely possible that the car is profitable for Nissan but I'm not convinced that the car is profitable for humanity.

One needs a prescription to eat lithium which is known to have profound effects in a neurological sense with catecholamine transporters.

I'm not sure that it will be wise to fill the junkyards of the world with that much lithium - if it can be found.

I object to the concept of distributed energy entirely precisely because by definition every single pollutant concerned with distributed energy is a point source pollutant. This would include lithium in this case, as well as the electrolytes and other structures.

It is relatively easy to contain the wastes of a rail system when compared with containing the wastes of billions of batteries.

Humanity evolved in the absence of cars, and there is no physiological need associated with them, our cultural illusions to the contrary nothwithstanding.

The worst aspects of the car CULTure in my view are not emissions, although by itself, the emissions would be bad enough and intractable. The real problem with cars has to do with land use issues, and long term toxicology, with emphasis on the former.

If one reads about the pollution of rivers by cars - let's take Ballona Creek in Los Angeles as an example - one finds that the toxicological aspects are largely connected with the electrical systems, and no, I'm not talking about lead alone.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V78-4R00FCK-1&_user=10&_coverDate=01%2F25%2F2008&_alid=1278261494&_rdoc=4&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=5836&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=16&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=67f72077daed504bab9040d224bf924e">Toxicity of urban highway runoff with respect to storm duration


Also, the car CULTure exists mostly because the largest portion of humanity lives in poverty. That is also an essential point in my view. The fact is that the "low price" of the Leaf is much greater than the average per capita income of the average human being.

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/DATASTATISTICS/0,,contentMDK:20535285~menuPK:1192694~pagePK:64133150~piPK:64133175~theSitePK:239419,00.html

It is impossible for me to wax enthusiastic about any form of the car CULTure. I frankly wish it didn't exist. From my perspective, the least obnoxious car is not the electric car, but is rather an ICE diesel powered by the miracle fuel DME. But DME cannot make cars "green." Nothing can make cars "green." It is like trying to say that one can make lions live on tofu.

A lion is a lion and a car is a car.

Saying an electric car or a DME diesel ICE car is better than the status quo to me is like an alcoholic announcing that he or she is cured because he or she has stopped drinking whiskey and now limits himself or herself to a six pack of beer or three glasses of wine a day. One's liver doesn't care where or how the alcohol comes from, only that it is alcohol.

I don't think eliminating cars is impossible. On the contrary I think its inevitable. The real question is whether cars, in their inevitable demise, drag humanity and most other higher organisms with them when they go, as they will go.

[Statistical]

30. Lithium will be recycled, not because it is the right thing to do but because it is valuable.

Lithium is currently about $300 a pound.

There will be no junkyards full of lithium for the same reason there are no junkyards full of gold.

[NNadir]

32. There is a big difference between recycling lithium and recycling say, plutonium.

The difference is very much concerned with energy density.

As of 2008, provisionally, the average American consumed annually about 327 million BTU's, which in less nonsensical units of energy is 345 billion joules, 345 gigajoules.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec1_13.pdf

This of course, includes the energy associated with the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. it is energy, not work.

The recoverable thermal energy associated with a fission event, as I'm sure you know is about 190 MeV per atom, give or take a few MeV.

If we take the mass of plutonium to be 239, this implies that a kilogram of plutonium contains about 4.2 moles of plutonium, and that in turn implies that a kilogram of plutonium contains about 76.7 trillion joules.

It follows that the entire energy demand of an American, hardly the most frugal people on the planet when it comes to consuming energy, involves about 4 grams of plutonium per year.

There isn't a laptop battery on earth that weighs 4 grams, never mind a car battery.

It is relatively easy to handle per capita, four grams of material, less trivial to handle tons per capita, as anyone with a garbage can might grasp with a little reflection.

It's a matter of energy density.

The matter of cost will appear in the lithium car battery case only after the matter is attempted, whereupon it will inevitably fail.

The matter of the dying car CULTure reminds me of Abraham Lincoln speaking to Senators from the "loyal" slave states about supporting the 13th Amendment, somewhere about 1863 or 1864. He told them that no matter what, slavery was dead, so they might as well try to make its death orderly. He actually proposed to compensate slave owners in Kentucky, Delaware, Missouri and Maryland for their "loss" of "property."

They refused to understand the matter, even though everything Lincoln said was immediately obvious.

Rightly they lost their slaves and their money.

Sometimes one hears of energy being described in terms of numbers of slaves that one employs. It's not a bad analogy in some sense of the word, since having access to energy can allow the ordinary person to accomplish by one's self, the work that might have taken the efforts of hundreds of people in ordinary times. A computer for instance, can replace the efforts of thousands of papyrus toting slaves in the times of the Pharaohs, something I will mention on the Jewish Passover holiday.

Of course, unlike the days of the Pharaohs, we have billions of people who either expect to live or want to live like, or better than, Pharaohs lived. In the last one hundred years or so, that has been accomplished by burning dangerous fossil fuels, and I'm not convinced that the results have not, in the long term, been any less pernicious than slavery was in its time.

Lithium is one of the rarest elements in the universe as a whole. There's a lot of it here on earth, of course, but not that much, really. It's soluble and thus slippery and escapes easily. To reconcentrate it requires energy.

It's not going to work for the long term.

[wtmusic]

31. Lithium is not a limitless resource

and there's even a bigger monetary incentive to recycle it than lead, of which 90%+ is recycled. And it's only toxic, at least to humans, in far greater concentrations than lead. So at this point lithium pollution isn't very high on the list of environmental concerns.

Re: the urban highway runoff, can you post the part about electrical pollutants ($32 on scientific literature is not in the budget this week)?

I don't doubt that the price of the Leaf is greater than the income of the average human being, but how does the largest portion of humanity living in poverty cause the car culture? Are you suggesting that if we gave up our cars and rode mass transportation that the rest of the world would be less impoverished? I probably would be a better person if I forwent all automotive transportation and donated the savings to a food bank, but I'm not going to beat myself up too badly for supporting a new product that has the potential to cut atmospheric CO2 drastically, especially at this point in history.

And I can't buy the idea that car culture has to be "cured", i.e. eliminated, to mitigate its impacts. Cars can, in fact, be made cleaner while mass transportation is taking their place. To wish the car culture didn't exist doesn't help, any more than wishing war didn't exist - and an alcoholic who has a glass of wine a day is far better off than one who drinks a fifth of whiskey.