Reports: French state investment fund withdraws investment in Renault EV battery plant; loan not to be granted
10 July 2011
La Tribune. The French Strategic Investment Fund (ISF) will not invest €125 million (US$178 million) in Renault’s EV battery plant in Flins, French media reports. In addition, a €100 million public loan will no longer be granted.
France owns 15% of Renault, which is investing €4 billion with alliance partner Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. in its electric-vehicle program.
The manufacture of Li-ion batteries and the EV Zoe at Flins was the topic of a meeting between French Minister of Industry, Eric Besson, and the Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn last week, according to the reports.
The battery project is some one and half years behind the original schedule; funding will now fall entirely to Renault. The newspaper Liberation charged that the delay is due to Renault’s dissatisfaction with the battery technology being provided by Nissan, especially related to the cost.
Losing ~$300M US in financing means Nissan best start delivering Leafs to all promised customers now and get the 'twice the range' batteries they claim on the road sooner than 2015.
Posted by: kelly | 10 July 2011 at 07:32 AM
So much for the hype about advanced battery technologies the proverbial chickens are comming home to roost.
Posted by: Mannstein | 10 July 2011 at 12:02 PM
GM spent years and $millions just evaluating batteries before choosing LG Chem's lithium polymer manganese batteries and then developed a very sophisticated liquid temperature control. Looks more and more like they did their homework correctly.
Posted by: Roy_H | 10 July 2011 at 09:44 PM
My guess is that it has nothing to do with the batteries but everything to do with politics that went wrong. Moreover, it does not matter much as the Renault Nissan alliance is building capacity for 500,000 EVs per year and the French factory was only going to do 50,000 units or 10% of the planned capacity. I think Nissan Renault will just build a factory at another location or expand capacity for its UK battery factory currently under construction.
The best guess I can make about Nissan’s battery costs is that they spend about 16,000 USD per pack on the 33,000 USD Leaf and that they will be able to cut the pack price to about 10000 USD for a 24kWh pack by 2015 and thereby reduce the price of the Leaf to 27,000 USD. The price reduction could actually be larger because Nissan will also be able to cut the cost of making the other parts of the Leaf when it reaches mass production with 250,000 units per year sometime in 2014 with 150k units produced in the US, 50k made in Japan and 50k made in the UK.
Kelly when Nissan get their higher energy density batteries ready for 2015 production the most likely use is to offer an extended range version of the Leaf that will also cost more than the current version with a 24kWh battery. I guess you will be able to buy an extended range Leaf with a 44kWh battery pack for about 33,000 USD at that time along with a 27,000 USD version with the old 24kWh pack.
Posted by: Account Deleted | 11 July 2011 at 01:53 AM
I wish Nissan, Tesla, Ford, GM and all the EV makers the best of luck. It remains to be seen how many they sell.
Posted by: SJC | 11 July 2011 at 07:06 AM
By implementing the LANR-CF technology in any of a number of configurations the average cost per system is $25/kW. So a 15kW home generator utilizing Mills' CIHT solid state technology will cost under $500! But let's triple that for manufacturer cost and sales and markup, etc.
$1,500 buys us a home electrical energy appliance that eliminates the monthly utility payment and allows us to charge our EV overnight at a cost of about $0.25. Hmmm.
Goodbye fossil fuel.
Posted by: Reel$$ | 12 July 2011 at 08:26 AM
"Goodbye fossil fuel."
Hello cold fusion nutcases!
Posted by: Herm | 12 July 2011 at 03:42 PM