Renewable Gossip

For the past few years, Carlos Ghosn, president and CEO of Nissan, has consistently called gas-electric hybrids “niche products” and “not a good business story.” But the popularity of hybrids, especially in Japan, is apparently pulling Nissan into the hybrid market.

The Nissan Altima Hybrid is currently the company’s only hybrid available in the United States. It used technology licensed from Toyota and is selling in only eight states.

On Friday, a Nissan spokesman told Bloomberg News that the automaker is “studying possibilities to put our hybrid system in other models” in addition to the Nissan Altima Hybrid and a future luxury hybrid. According to Nissan, no definite decisions about which models will become hybrids have been made.

Nissan has been licensing Toyota’s hybrid technology for use in the Altima Hybrid, which is sold in eight states in the United States. In August 2008, Nissan announced that it will develop its own hybrid technology, featuring lithium ion batteries, rear-wheel drive and a parallel hybrid powertrain. Nissan will begin selling hybrids based on its own homegrown technology in Japan in 2011. A new report from Nikkei indicated that a minivan could be Nissan’s first hybrid in Japan.

The first sign that Nissan could be making a u-turn on hybrids came in April 2009, when Minoru Shinohara, Nissan corporate senior vice president, said that plug-in hybrids will be an important transition solution to the pure electric vehicle because they don’t need an extensive public charging infrastructure. The cost of building the public charging infrastructure will cost billions of dollars; therefore, most analysts believe that it could take years to construct.

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