Japan’s third-largest automaker IS betting big on its ‘reasonably-priced’ mass production electric vehicle, Leaf, which will be rolled out by
Nissan in Japan and the US in 2010 and by Renault in Europe a year later. To Nissan’s credit, Leaf already has a real-world look, having gone beyond the concept car stage and is a mediumsized , spacious car with an urban charging range.

Nissan also realised that charging up infrastructure is as crucial to the electric car as fuel bunks to gasoline cars. To tackle the tricky situation , it inked pacts with municipal corporations and urban administrations of large cities to set the infrastructure up. Given the new green focus that many cities have developed, the response was more than encouraging.

“We have 31 agreements across the US, Japan and France. I believe electric cars will grab 10% market share by 2020. Forecasts range between a much more modest 1% and 1.5%. My reasons for confidence are the internal surveys Nissan carried out: 8% of car owners in the US say electric cars are their first choice while the figure for Japan is 9%. And that is today,” Ghosn says. Nissan is not so sure about Leaf’s rollout in India citing lack of infrastructure and lack of keenness on part of the government.

The other critical lever of the e-car project — what Ghosn calls the ‘Nissan difference’ — is manufacturing batteries in-house . “Our aim is to become a big player in batteries, which is the heart of an e-car . We are not going to source batteries, we are going to make them, and even sell them to others,” he says. Nissan, to boot, already has a venture with NEC for batteries with plants in the UK, Portugal and the US. “It can be a very important profit centre for us.”

Nissan needs these smart strategies to ride out of the downturn and secure its future. And Ghosn, fondly called the turnaround artiste, is best-suited to steer the rebound . In 1999, the company was straining under $19 billion in debt, a $6-billion loss and shedding market share in both Japan and the US.

He was also being undermined by Nissan insiders who wanted his reforms to fail. He bypassed Japanese etiquette , taking tough calls like sacking people and closing down plants — five in a single day — and drew a lot of flak, but the very next year the firm was back in the black.

The situation today is not different, but not as bad. For the first quarter ending June, Nissan suffered loses of $170 million with sales dropping 23% over the same year-ago period. Volumes slumped 31% in the US and the sales graph in Japan and Europe too was declining. Only China showed a 9% sales-jump and that holds the key to Nissan’s second strategy prong: growth markets.

“Even if demand from US, Japan or Europe recuperates, growth will not come from these countries. It will be from emerging markets: China, India and the Middle-East ,” says Ghosn, his boldness unmistakable. And since he practices what he preaches, Nissan’s new global compact cars will roll out from plants in India, Thailand and China all through 2010.