Nissan Leafs are falling
Sales for the Leaf™ have been underwhelming, so Nissan is “doubling-down” their bet by reducing the price of the Leaf to waaaay below their costs. I suspect Nissan is hoping that Leaf sales won’t spike since they sell each Leaf at a 30% loss.
Nissan plans to sell cheaper Leaf
Financial Times via motoring.asiaone.com | 21 Oct. 2012
Nissan plans to offer a lower-priced version of its Leaf to help spark sales of the electric car, which is selling well below the company’s earlier forecasts.
The move comes against a broader backdrop of disappointing early sales for plug-in cars, despite billions of dollars of loans, grants and consumer subsidies offered by governments in recent years to promote the fledgling sector.
Nissan sold fewer than 12,000 Leafs in the first half of this fiscal year…below its goal of selling 40,000 of the cars for the full year…
More...
Above: An endless horizon of unsold Nissan Leafs—The excess inventory sitting on the docks of Long Beach, California Odaiba Tokyo.
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October 22nd, 2012 at 5:11 pm
Disclaimer:
In the US, I now own a Nissan Altima Hybrid (called the “Teana” in Japan), which seems merely an OK vehicle. My Altima Hybrid is a rather under-whelming car with only a modest improvement in its gas mileage of 36 mpg (0.06 l/km) over the standard gas engine version’s 32 mpg.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Altima_Hybrid
Here in Japan I drive a Nissan Fuga 35GT (Infiniti M35 Sport) that has screaming performance (0-to-50 mph in 5.3 sec) but offers a respectable 23 mpg.
October 22nd, 2012 at 11:50 pm
With japanese license plates ? without the white vinyl to protect the hood during tranport ? and steering wheel on the right ?
(plus often cars are send to dealership with iron wheels)
October 22nd, 2012 at 11:54 pm
Hmmm, you are right. I just grabbed the first photo of Nissan Leafs stacked up in a storage lot I could find. Oops.
Sorry about my mistake, but the photo was smallish, low-resolution and cropped.
After some digging, I found the original, full-sized, AP photo (below) that shows bunch of licensed Leafs parked in Tokyo’s Odaiba waterfront (for who knows what reason).
November 1st, 2012 at 7:09 pm
Normally, I do not write comments, however I just browsed through a bunch of the comments on the 3Yen and felt I had to say something.
Is it just me or does it look like a few of these comments come across like they are written by brain dead folks? :-P