Renault-Nissan Electric Cars Eschew Petrol, Thanks To Coal Fired Power

Renault-Nissan Electric Cars Eschew Petrol, Thanks To Coal Fired Power

The Renault-Nissan Alliance is cranking up its campaign of disinformation about the cleanliness of its electric vehicles.

Today in the Wall Street Journal Europe, Renault-Nissan has a full page advert proclaiming that the future of the electric car is now.

“The Renault-Nissan Alliance is launching a full line-up of zero-emission cars that can be charged with electricity and never consume a drop of gasoline,” says the advert.

Sure, it’s true that Renault Nissan electric vehicles don’t consumer a drop of gasoline. That’s because most of the time they are running on electricity generated by burning coal.

If Renault-Nissan could say in its add that their electric cars will cost half as much and go twice as far as they do now, maybe it could be taken seriously. But the brute fact remains that a car like a Nissan Leaf costs about twice as much as a similar petrol or diesel engine saloon, and will only get the driver about 100 miles on a good day. And its Zero Emissions claim is simply risible when you think of the smoke-stacks across Europe generating electricity.

Renault finds itself on the wrong end of a huge miscalculation of the demand for electric vehicles. Investment bank Morgan Stanley recently cut its forecast for battery-only vehicle sales to 4.5 per cent of the global market in 2025 from the previous expectation of 8.6 per cent. This looks even more savage when you compare it with Renault-Nissan’s hubris driven expectation of 10 per cent by 2020. Most manufacturers believe demand for electric cars will be probably less than half Renault-Nissan’s forecast, and its investors must be wondering what kind of return they will get from the $5.6 billion investment to build 500,000 electric vehicles a year in eight countries by the end of 2013.

Renault isn’t going to change anything by purveying such obvious porkies in its adverts, and runs the risk of a backlash if it refuses to tone down its campaign of misinformation.