Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida joined Cheddar News to discuss how the Japanese automaker is planning to regain market share in the U.S. with more affordable EV vehicles.

Nissan Looks to Regain Market Share With Affordable EVs

While Tesla now reigns supreme in the electric vehicle space. It was actually another company that pioneered the market in the past decade, Japanese automaker Nissan launching the leaf vehicle in 2010, becoming the first affordable mass electric vehicle on the planet. Since then though, it's lost market share to competition. Is vowing to gain it back though by launching new models and making some big investments. Earlier, I spoke with Makoto cheetah Ceo of Nissan about its electric suv aria that's launching this month, take a listen. And this is very uh different E. V. That you can enjoy not only the venus but also the drivability coming from our in motor which is equipped and we have this experience for a very long time and I'm sure that the customer would value this kind of new tv that we introduced in this market. Talk to me more about what makes this vehicle unique, why consumers should buy this. Whether it's the ride the field, the interior, the exterior, what's the special sauce? Well, if you go into this car you will find a huge space and first of all the console is moving back. So you will have a practice space for your cargo and you have leg loom. So this is coming from all our experience of the 10 years over 10 years living with the E. V. Which makes that the come very comfortable for the customers. Well, certainly the future of transportation does seem to be electric. And in fact we've seen the U. S. Government plan to end sales of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 offering tax credits and other incentives to consumers to encourage them to make the switch to an electric vehicle. So besides the $500 million us to boost competitiveness? Yes, because the US market is very important for us and we have announced already the $500 million TV. On top of that, we're looking at additional 250 in total $750 million dollars to be invested in this market. I've started seeing that a lot of the move in the U. S. And I think there's a visibility that us electrification is started to picking up and we really would like to play the law and we want to be present in this market. Well, a big part of the electric vehicle story are the batteries that power these vehicles. And I know that you have announced plans to introduce a proprietary, low cost solid state battery. What does that offer over conventional E. V. Batteries on the market right now. And when can we expect to see it inside these Nissan cars? So thank you for asking this question because we announced the ambition 2030 in one year ago and one of our announcement that we had is we really would like to introduce all solid state battery which enabled the charging time to be only one third as compared to the today's battery And there's a huge d layout can be played with the battery because it's all sorted state, which can have more room, more layout to make it happen. So we are introducing that pilot plant in Japan 2024 And we're seeking for the mass production by the time of 2028. 1 of the challenges that we've seen across the economy and especially in the automotive space during the pandemic, is the intense supply chain challenges and the chip shortages, the lack of semiconductors needed to power parts of these vehicles. What is Nissan doing to alleviate these issues? Well, we do have the very challenging work in the environment started with the Covid and we have the supply chain issue, which is represented by the semiconductor. But the step by step day by day, the situation is getting better. What we have to be conscious is that how we can father to have a good monitor with the supplier and how we can make sure that our product to be coming out of the plan for the customer. So today, a lot of customers waiting our car. So we really would like to feel, uh, make sure that the time to be improved on the next coming days or next come in the months that we're trying to do our best. Is there some sort of time frame, our, you do anticipate that the supply chain issues will finally be behind us? Well, it's very difficult to predict because as you know, today, even in china, we have a lot of the lockdown situation due to the covid. So we only thing we have to do is we have to anticipate and plan carefully and how we can make our supplications to be better. So this is very important for our population today. We are looking at in the globally very closely, you know, to make that the situation to be better day by day because of supply chain challenges and certainly other issues on the macro economic front, we continue to see prices rise at a pretty steep pace. Will consumers see higher prices for your vehicles in the future? And how do you ensure that your cars do remain affordable? Yeah, we need to vary. Look, our plies to the customer has to be acceptable. And of course, there's a lot of the volatility, not only the exchange rate, but also the law material. So we have to make sure how the cause of future is that be accepted by the customer, including its price range. And we would have to be careful to look at the market and to make sure that the customer acceptance are there for the every single vehicle that we're going to deliver to the customer. So do you anticipate perhaps single digit price point gains or perhaps double digit price point gains ahead? Yeah. At this moment very difficult to predict that kind of area. But again, we have to anticipate and how we can satisfy the customer. Again, we always ask ourselves for the customers centric and we need to make sure that the acceptance of the vehicle and the price is most important when we do the operation in this region, any other plans that you can share with us for the future of Nissan? Yeah, we talked about the, our ambition in next 5 to 10 years. If you look into the next 10 years, we are going to introduce the 23 electrified model over the world. And today, I think we can already tell you it's much getting more numbers of the electrified vehicle from what we said on 23 is planned to be delivered and I think the world is started to move in the pace of the electrified vehicle much faster than we are expected in two or three years ago. And we want to make sure that the Nissan plant to be well accepted by the customer. And we father to deliver our value through this kind of electrified uh strategy that we're taking. Thanks there again to Makoto Uchida Ceo of Nissan for that great interview earlier. We appreciate it