- Honda realized Nissan has nothing to offer them
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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Sources say.
Honda is better off without them.
Personally think Nissan is better positioned for the EV future and Honda is likely to be the one that needed this more. 🤷♂️
Nissan could have been better positioned for EV but they didn't bother actually doing anything with the Leaf for a decade.
Kinda like how they could have been a high performance brand with the GTR if they bothered to actually do any more development on it for the past decade.
The leaf was an objectively terrible Eevee that probably set the industry back a few years.
Autocorrect changed it to Eevee and I think it works.
Disagree, they are exactly the type of EV we should be building: inexpensive, enough range for around town, pretty dependable. The first couple model years had crappy range, but the later ones were fine.
What Nissan needed was to expand the EV product line. Ideas:
- make the Leaf cheaper - 150 mile range, look into cheaper chemistries; should be the cheapest EV on the road; prize prioritize reliability and cost
- make a sports car that you want to drive - this is your flagship - prioritize speed and style
- make something in between the two (fast, but also practical) - what most people will get; compete directly with Model 3
Don't compete on range at all, that's R&D you don't want to deal with. Just make great cars for urban and suburban use.
They weren't dependable is the problem. There were a lot of problems with early deterioration of the battery, supposedly from not having very good temperature control on the battery pack.
Sure, and battery deterioration is largely only a problem if you don't have much range to begin with. They put larger batteries in after a year or two, which largely solved the problem for the intended use case: around town car.
But that's also why I mentioned reliability and price should be the focus. They're not going to be leading R&D on better battery range, so they might as well focus on a niche.
Range anxiety is not an illegitimate concern though. Sure I probably don't need that capacity more than maybe once every year but what about when I do need it?
How am I supposed to be able to drive halfway across the country to see my family every Christmas if my car only has 150 miles of range and it takes 4 hours to fully recharge. That's going to turn a 3-hour road trip into 10 hours if we have to stop and wait for it to recharge. My problem with the leaf was that it had hardly any range at all so that problem was massively exacerbated.
It's great in a multi-car household where the other car is something with a bit more range but as you're only vehicle you better hope that no family emergency crop up.
To be clear I would have the same issues with an ICE only had 150 miles of range but in some ways that would be better because it "recharges" faster.
Range anxiety is not an illegitimate concern though.
Hence why I focused on vehicle classes more common as a second car. We have two cars, and one never goes further than 100 miles in a given day.
That's the niche EVs should focus on, especially while battery tech makes >400 mile range impractical. I think Nissan (or any car company) could do quite well focusing on the second car market.
Except the chevy volt is cheaper and has a longer range. Nissan has also done nothing with battery tech or chemistry. That's all been being advanced by Samsung, toyota and panasonic. There's nothing the leaf has to offer on a technology front, and there's no reason to buy one today. Even a decade ago it was a poor choice for 95% of the US market.
Right, which is why I said they should've focused on price and reliability. They're not going to lead on battery tech, so they should experiment with things like sodium ion batteries, which are much cheaper, have less fire risk, and they don't need the range anyway for a commuter/around town car.
Find a niche and fill it.
Sodium ion is a dead end for ev. Heavy and not even remotely close to energy dense enough. It never will be.
I thought it was something like 75% as energy dense? If you're targeting a commuter with a max needed range of 150 miles, it seems more than sufficient.
It's not going to solve the range anxiety problem, but it's inexpensive, which is perfect for a cheap, around-town second car, which is precisely what the Leaf should be.
Usability wise for energy storage by weight, it's more like 150wh compared to 250. They also don't handle moving around as well, which is bad for vehicles. Then because sodium is a larger ion, they're also always going to take up more space. So heavier and bigger makes them even less power efficient to move a vehicle and means heavier suspension and more tire wear.
I think those tradeoffs are fine assuming a huge cost difference. I'm under the impression that sodium ion batteries cost something like 1/3 of a lithium ion battery. And since the battery is most of the cost of a car, a commuter could be very cost competitive.
I don't know about cold weather efficiency, but honestly, most of that 150 mile range is to account for winter range drop. A commuter only really needs about 75 miles usable range year round.
People would put up with a lot for an attractive price.
Charging is a huge hassle in a big city where everyone lives in apartments but 75 miles a day would be enough. People living out of big cities where they can charge at home often have to travel over 75 miles a day.
Yeah, this is assuming you can plug in at home or at work. My commute is 25 miles each way, which is about as far as I'd consider going, and I can charge at home, so it would totally work for me and the people stuck in traffic with me.
Of course, then you're also stuck needing to have two vehicles, because unlike someone who lives in New York city and may go a decade without leaving, you likely make a trip or have to got to a few places that would ad up to over 150 miles fairly often. Often enough that you'd need a vehicle for it.
We're going to have two vehicles regardless, and that's pretty common for families and couples. The average cars per household is around 2, and above that in many states.
The Leaf wouldn't be targeting single vehicle households, but family units where one is a dedicated commuter and the other is a family car.
Didn't the Bolt come out 6 years after the Leaf? It should be a lot better in that case as the pace of development has been pretty rapid in EV space relative to normal ICE development
Nah.
Honda has a much better product in the first place, their engineering approach has always been better than Nissan (I say this having worked on every major brand, and some unknowns).
Nissan is one of the better ones, but they're still a big step away from Honda.
And Honda was working on hydrogen nearly 30 years ago now, which seems poised to suplant batteries (again, maybe).
Hydrogen cannot supplant batteries in mass market cars. It doesn't make sense, primarily for reasons concerning the laws of physics.
It takes a tremendous amount more energy to power a hydrogen car.
Use a lot of electricity to split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, force the oxygen to react with another substance leaving pure hydrogen, siphon it away, spend more energy compressing it to bomb-like pressures (or alternatively cooling it until it becomes a liquid, at great energy cost), transport it to hydrogen stations, pump it into cars, do reverse hydrolysis (also incurring a large energy loss) to turn it back into electricity to charge a battery to power an electric motor. [Bonus: since the battery is tiny, it can't supply a huge amount of power instantaneously - making hydrogen cars far slower than a typical EV.]
OR:
Take that electricity, send it over some wires with over 95% energy efficiency, charge a battery that powers an electric motor.
Then there's the safety considerations for the cars because they have highly compressed hydrogen on board, the same is true for hydrogen fueling stations which cost a fortune and have an unbelievable amount of red tape. Meanwhile it's easy and cheap to add charging points everywhere, because practically everywhere already has electricity.
Their range isn't even much better, because not only is the energy density really bad compared to petrol or diesel, you're also compromised on fuel tank size due to it having to be small, spherical, unlikely to be struck in a crash (ie must be put in an inconvenient place re: car packaging) and phenomenally structurally strong, all to prevent it from exploding like compressed hydrogen likes to do.
There's a reason why despite every manufacturer toying with hydrogen vehicles for decades, there's basically only the Mirai that you can actually buy, for an awful price, and it's a shit car, while there are several hundred EVs out there right now. One is a viable car technology, and one is basically an EV with a long list of compromises.
And Honda was working on hydrogen nearly 30 years ago now, which seems poised to suplant batteries (again, maybe).
LOL, no. Hydrogen has never been anything but a greenwashing scam. Even if it were all produced from electrolysis (and to be clear, it isn't -- the vast majority is produced from fossil fuels), it would still be stupidly cumbersome to deal with compared to adding some carbon to it to make synthetic gasoline.
Lol, hydrogen. A chronological oddity. Has spent the last 30+ years just 10 years away from being viable.
And Honda was working on hydrogen nearly 30 years ago now
Unless they have a fusion reactor they're not telling us about, so that they can electrolyze water hydrogen is never going to be a viable power source. Currently all hydrogen is acquired through fracking, which makes the entire exercise somewhat pointless.
I think hydrogen has a future, but more for long haul trucking than personal cars. The general idea is to generate a ton of solar power during the day and use the excess to produce hydrogen, and then use the hydrogen to fuel heavy equipment, trucks, and cover for low solar production days.
This solves many of the issues with hydrogen:
- no need to transport hydrogen, just use it locally
- wasting energy for production is fine because it would be wasted anyway
- only used in heavy equipment, so no need to sell the public on it
Hydrogen remains a solution desperately in search of a problem.
If your aim is to generate locally, why not just use batteries? They're cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable. Why have the lossy and very high maintenance electrolysis and hydrogen storage/transfer process involved?
Are they cheaper? Even over 1M miles or whatever a truck engine is expected to go? And for running a warehouse overnight? I find that hard to believe.
But even if true, you need to take range into account. Hydrogen cars get better range than comparable BEVs, and that would surely add up for a truck hauling a massive load. And as hydrogen scales up, it'll get cheaper. It's currently a bit more expensive than gas (about 3-4x), but that's with hydrogen transported from some plant somewhere. If it's locally generated from solar, it'll probably be quite a bit cheaper.
Are they cheaper? Even over 1M miles or whatever a truck engine is expected to go?
Yes, significantly so. Hydrogen fuel cells have a much shorter lifespan and higher manufacturing/replacement cost than lithium ion batteries. The compressed gas tanks are also very expensive and have a limited lifespan (albeit a relatively long one, compared to the fuel cells).
And as hydrogen scales up, it'll get cheaper. It's currently a bit more expensive than gas (about 3-4x), but that's with hydrogen transported from some plant somewhere. If it's locally generated from solar, it'll probably be quite a bit cheaper.
Market rate hydrogen is currently about as cheap as it's possible to get, because it is almost exclusively from fossil fuel sources which are gradually winding down.
Locally produced electrolysis hydrogen suffers from very low efficiency rates; about 2/3rds of the power used to produce the hydrogen is lost in the process. Assuming you don't have an enormous overabundance of power being generated, it's more efficient to store the power locally in batteries (which don't have to be lithium ion if it's for static storage; other chemistries become competitive if they don't need to move around) than it is to store it as hydrogen. And if you're generating a huge overabundance of power such that throwing 2/3rds of it away seems sensible, in most cases the question would be why you don't make a grid connection and feed in anyway (extreme remote locations notwithstanding).
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Battery-powered vehicles require an unreasonable amount of water to control a fire. 1 burning Tesla needs 1 fire truck of water, so imagine what a bigger vehicle would need.
I don't think the size of the vehicle matters, but where it's placed. A sufficiently large battery (e.g. something powering a warehouse) is unlikely to be right next to a bunch of important stuff, so they'll just let it burn out. A Tesla, however, is much more likely to be next to a bunch of other cars, so they need to contain it.
That way though you would have to haul around the electrolyzing equipment with you which seems redundant and it's pretty heavy. I'm not sure that would necessarily work.
Also in that scenario you would have to keep the water on board so that you could electrolyze it again. That adds even more weight. A molecule of water weighs 18 times more than a single hydrogen atom so every single time you run this process your vehicle suddenly gets massively heavier.
I think you misunderstood me. I'm saying good trucks would use the fuel, not generate it. They'd stop at warehouses and hubs and whatnot to refuel using "waste" energy from the warehouse or hub.
The whole point is that trucks largely take routine routes, so it's fine if availability is limited because they can plan trips around refueling points. Also, they're massive, so there are plenty of options for storing the hydrogen since space isn't really an issue.
Why do you need a fusion reactor for electrolysis?
Because otherwise you're spending more energy converting water into a hydrogen then you get back from turning hydrogen into water.
You still do with Fusion power but at that point you have so much energy it doesn't matter how inefficient it is. Seriously even using nuclear power it doesn't work out as economically viable. It's really a wasteful and inefficient process.
There have been some recent advances on hydrogen production. I don't think this (sorry for the MSN link) is the one I heard of, but is an interesting example where cheaper catalysts are improving the efficiency of hydrogen production.
Now, I don't know if or when hydrogen will be more cost-effective than batteries, which are also experiencing massive advances. This is why I'm going to take the comment someone on Lemmy made about buying used EVs for the next little while - it's cheaper, they're lasting longer than predicted, and the advances lined up for the next few years are significant.
I got excited because I saw a Honda EV, a prologue. Looked it up, it's a rebranded Chevy Blazer. Honda is absolutely fucked...
How about YAY!?
We need more smaller brands, not less bigger brands. It ALWAYS without exception leads to a destination where consumers get screwed.
I celebrate this failure, let them compete and let more smaller brands pop up, please
There's no situation I would call Nissan a "smaller brand" of anything.
Good
More Nissan for me!
But yeah, Nissan seems to be making some nicer cars lately. Hopefully they can shake off the bad stigma gained by Goghn's cost cutting and bad cvts. Plus, Nissan actually makes electric cars, something Honda, I don't believe, has even attempted yet. They had a sweet deal with GM, and they dropped the partnership. Nissans got the Leaf and Aria, and there's rumors of them using Mitsubishi's hybrid system in the upcoming years.
They were one of the few, if only, remaining manufacturers in the US that produced a subcompact car. Yet they are getting rid of both the Versa and Altima.
I hate how everybody bloated up their fleets with crossovers and SUVs...
I hate how everybody bloated up their fleets with crossovers and SUVs…
While I generally think regulations are a net positive, the cafe regulations treating SUVs as trucks for minimum mileage is the main reason for the ever increasing vehicle size and shift to massive SUVs dominating the roads.
They should be less punishing for smaller cars and more punishing for large vehicles designed for passengers and commuting.
Exactly. The whole point was to help farmers, but it was broad enough that car manufacturers could include SUVs under the rule.
We should've just allowed an exemption for models sold exclusively to farmers if that was a concern. Or just, don't do it.
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I do worry about Nissan's future when they seem to be about this close to operating with zero profits.
Honda has made both the "e" in 2020 and "e:Ny1" in 2023, both seem like decent BEVs in their price segment.
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