Smooth sailing for Aussie Leaf launch

NISSAN has confirmed that the Australian launch of the Leaf EV remains on track and that the production timetable for exports from its aluminium castings plant in Victoria is unchanged, despite setbacks following the devastating Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March.

Reports out of the United States this week have revealed that demand for the new electric vehicle is outstripping production in Japan after technical problems and communications issues disrupted the original schedule, and were made worse by restricted parts supply and power shortages in the wake of the March 11 disaster.

The Japanese car-maker has now ramped up production to ease delays but indicated that it could be forced to delay the start of US production of the Leaf at its plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, which is due to come on line with battery production in September next year ahead of vehicle assembly in December.

Nissan Australia spokesman Jeff Fisher told GoAuto that the contract at its Dandenong plant to produce aluminium castings for the Leaf – which from early next year will export the components at the rate of 22,000 a month to three plants assembling the Leaf, including Smyrna – remains “unchanged”.

“There’s no change to current inverter castings production plans,” he said.

Left: Nissan Australia managing director Dan Thompson with Leaf parts in Dandenong. Below: Leaf drive and production shots.



“Some of our castings currently manufactured in Dandenong for internal combustion engine vehicles have been curtailed due to the Japan situation, but, as you mentioned, our Leaf inverter parts production doesn’t begin until next year – so it’s not currently an issue.”

Mr Fisher also said the Leaf remained on schedule to reach the Australian market in April next year and that Nissan was poised to begin local fleet briefings “within weeks”.

He said ‘expressions of interest’ from prospective customers rather than firm orders were being collected – with the number “in the hundreds”.

“We think we will be selling about 100 Leafs per month by the time full supply is attained,” Mr Fisher said, adding that the company was looking at offering both private sales and lease arrangements from launch.

Australian pricing is expected to match the smaller Mitsubishi i-MiEV EV, which was this week announced as having a $48,800 sticker price (plus on-road costs) when retail sales commence in August, although Mr Fisher cautioned that “i-MiEV to Leaf is not apples to apples – Leaf will be a larger, premium-specced vehicle”.

He said a decision on pricing would be made closer to launch.

Nissan Motor Co corporate vice-president and head Nissan’s Global Zero Emission Vehicle Business Unit, Hideaki Watanabe, this week was quoted by US industry journal Automotive News as saying the March earthquake had put the company “in a very difficult situation” and that it was seeking ways to minimise delays for both customer deliveries and its American production schedules.

“We are not giving up yet,” Mr Watanabe said. “Is there a potential for delay? There may be. We are assessing right now.

“On March 11 every operation stopped so all the resources that were in place were used to restore Japan. All the milestones and studies to localise production in the United States were stopped.”

The Tennessee plant will reportedly have the capacity to build 150,000 Leaf EVs a year.

Mr Watanabe would not be drawn on estimating how long production at the US plant could be delayed, but reiterated that production of the EV had been deliberately “conservative” to date in order to ensure quality.

Leaf production capacity in Japan for this year is reportedly 50,000 units.

“I’m asking the manufacturing team to come back to that cycle time,” Mr Watanabe said. “We’re not there yet but we are improving every day very dramatically.”

As GoAuto has reported, Nissan announced in April that it was calling back around 5300 examples of the car in Japan, North America and Europe for a ‘voluntary repair’ to fix a software problem in the vehicle control module that had caused starting problems on some cars.

Media reports quoting American customers who were among those to reserve the first 20,000 Leafs in the US also highlight issues such as unexplained order cancellations, lengthy delays with delivery and unexpected removal from the waiting list due to the need to prove installation of a home-charging unit.

Nissan is planning to deliver at least 10,000 Leafs to customers in the US this year – half the number of reservations it secured last year. Pricing starts from $US32,780, while a federal tax credit can reduce that by a further $US7500.

There are no such government subsidies in Australia.

The Leaf recently became the first EV to receive a five-star safety rating by the New Car Assessment Program in Europe, following a four-star rating handed down to the i-MiEV by the comparable Japanese NCAP crash-test regime in February.