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There has been a lot of discussion on this site regarding Nissan’s new all electric vehicle, the Leaf. This promotional video highlights the lithium-ion battery pack, and other cool features found in the car.

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On the heels of last week’s post about Nissan’s new plug-in hybrid, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nissan is the only car manufacturer out of Japan’s Big Three (Toyota, Honda, Nissan) that appears to be staking its future on full electric cars.

Unlike hybrids, full on electric cars will only travel as far as their battery packs allow. Honda and Toyota expressed skepticism over the technology, while Nissan is fully embracing it.

Critics of all-electric cars cite the high cost of batteries and the likely need for sizable government subsidies and incentives to make all-electric battery cars affordable. The lack of a wide network of battery-charging stations also could be an impediment.

Both Toyota and Honda say a full-electric car may work for certain consumers if they are willing to treat it as a town car with limited driving range. They also say the ultimate green car over the long run will be hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, which they believe will be more efficient than full-electric battery cars. Fuel-cell cars would create their own electricity through a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen.

Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s CEO, acknowledged his company was late to jump onto the hybrid bandwagon, and now plans to concentrate on battery-only cars. “We have had a period where we have had to catch up, but now we will exercise our technological power,” he said. “We are aiming for leadership in [electric vehicles].”

Nissan believes it has found a way to make electric cars, such as the Leaf, nearly as affordable as a gasoline-fueled compact cars. By selling it without its on-board battery pack, Nissan may lease the battery pack to the customer for an affordable month fee, among other means, its executives said.

But Nissan executives also stressed that government support is necessary to launch the Leaf, which it aims to sell world-wide in 2012.

“We are asking governments to cover [the investment] up to the point when we can reach volume momentum—this will take several years,” said Carlos Tavares, who heads Nissan’s Americas operations. Mr. Ghosn estimated that this would take three to four years.

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Automotive News reported (registration required) that while Nissan has in hand a laminated lithium ion battery (based on a manganese spinel cathode material) for use in its plug-in hybrid electric Leaf model, the automaker is already working on its next-generation battery design - and it may be sold to other automakers.

Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn told Automotive News that he expects the next-generation battery pack to be smaller and lighter than the current design. He also expects the new battery to be less expensive to manufacture.

“If you want to be in control of the cost, you’d better be involved [with the development],” Ghosn said. “We want to make sure we can drive the battery where we want to go.”

Ghosn revealed little else about the next-gen battery, but Nissan is working with Oak Ridge National Lab to develop batteries. ORNL has said a battery capable of delivering 400 miles on a single charge is feasible.

Nissan also believes it can make money simply by developing and manufacturing batteries, largely by selling them to other automakers. A plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, will reportedly be able to build 200,000 batteries each year, and Ghosn says Nissan will “sell the battery to whoever is interested.” Nissan received a $1.6 billion low-interest DOE loan to set up the plant, which should be operational in 2012.

Ghosn has noted several times that Nissan expect electric vehicles to be 10% of its global sales by 2020.

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Volvo C30 battery layout

Volvo Cars is currently evaluating the viability of a fully battery-electric vehicle. This year, Volvo has built and is internally testing a small number of prototype versions of a BEV version of its C30. In addition to focusing on performance and safety, much of the focus is on integration of the electric propulsion system with the rest of the car.

Lennart Stegland, director of Volvo Cars Special Vehicles, said in corporate statement: “The Volvo C30 is the first model we will try out with electric power. This car’s excellent properties in city traffic and its relatively low weight make it particularly suitable, since electric cars are primarily expected to be used in and around cities and for daily commuting.”

Volvo’s battery choice for the C30 BEV is designed and developed in the U.S. by EnerDel, Inc., Ener1’s U.S. battery subsidiary. This adds to the recently announced collaboration with Volvo on the V70 model plug-in hybrid demonstration vehicles being road tested in Europe starting this fall, which are also using the EnerDel lithium-ion batteries.

Volvo C30 BEV

EnerDel’s EV chemistry, hard carbon and mixed oxide in a lithium-ion battery pack, yields gross nominal power of 24 kWh lithium-ion battery pack and is said to be considering a 12 kWh pack. The EnerDel Volvo battery set is custom-made and is described as a split battery pack. With an energy content of more than 24 kWh nominal energy, Volvo plans that 22.7 kWh is used to power the car.

While the electric motor is located under the hood, one of the priorities of the Volvo project is to find the optimal placing of the battery. Most likely it will be the “prop shaft tunnel” and where the fuel tank normally is located. These locations are within the car’s optimized crumple zone in the most common collision scenarios.

Recharging the C30’s EnerDel battery pack via a household supply at 230V, 16A would take about eight hours. That’s connection comparable to what would be required for a laundry dryer or mid-sized window air conditioner.

The C30 BEV is limited to a top speed of about 130 km/h (80 mph)—more than sufficient, Volvo says, for a city car application. Acceleration from 0 to 100 km/h (62 mph) will take less than 11 seconds. The car would have a range of up to 150 kilometers (93 miles)—longer than the distance 90% of all Europe’s motorists drive per day and surely covers a wide swath of U.S. motorists as well.

So is this the beginning of the end for the gas-guzzling SUVs, suburbans and minivans, or is this just the birth of a new class of city-savvy cars? If Volvo is finally jumping on the electric bandwagon - a company that didn’t introduce its SUV until 2003, well after most drivers already owned one, it’s sure to be the true car of tomorrow.

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Credit: Better Place

(Hello to Ed Herderick, one of our new bloggers. Ed is working on his PhD in material sciences at The Ohio State University. His focus is on nanowire synthesis, characterization, and properties measurements, and if you ever want to yack with someone about the functional properties of oxides including gas sensing, piezoelectric, and ferroelectric properties- he’s your man.)

Plans for building the infrastructure necessary to realize widespread use of electric cars received a boost recently, after the mayors of San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco endorsed a plan by Better Place, a start-up based in Palo Alto. It’s an ambitious $1 billion plan to make the Bay Area the US’ electric car capital by building 250,000 charging ports, 200 battery-exchange stations, and a control center by 2012. Better Place has already organized similar plans in Israel, Denmark, and Australia.

The approach by the company is interesting in that they will allow consumers to buy the miles that they will drive the cars, while the cars themselves will be available for purchase at a reduced price, much like current cell phone plans. The company will then own the batteries. Charging of the batteries could be done on the street at simple plug-in outlets or used batteries could be swapped for charged ones at a station similar to a gas station.

Better Place has already raised $200 million in venture capital since its inception in 2007, so even though the plan is audacious in its scope it does have solid investor backing. If this vision can be realized then this will be a boon for the battery manufacturers and will lead to many fertile areas of study for ceramic engineers interested in battery technologies and manufacturing.

Update: Hawaii is in too.

Later update: Friedman cheers for Better Place.

First Better Place plug-in parking lot (Israel). Credit: Better Place

Bonus video illustrating Better Place system:

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