Japanese car giant Nissan has high hopes of distributing the world’s first mass-market electric car in the UAE, although it admits it will need government help to do it, the National has reported.
To that end, Nissan’s chief executive is in the UAE wooing the men behind Abu Dhabi’s carbon-neutral venue Masdar City.
“Strong international partnerships are valuable [for Nissan],” he said in a lecture at the diwan of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, the newspaper said.
“I applaud the plans to develop the world’s first city powered by renewable energy, and we think there are a lot of possibilities for very objective and realistic collaboration in order to support, with our own technology … the development of this reality.”
Nissan will start selling its all-electric hatchback, the Leaf, in Japanese and US markets by December this year. The car has a range of 160km.
A partnership with Masdar would appear to be a good match on paper; earlier this year, officials from the flagship development said that later stages of the project would see privately owned electric cars being used.
But a spokesman for Masdar told the paper that no formal talks had taken place.
“We’re always interested in exploring new partnerships, but at this point in time I’m not aware of any discussions on this subject,” he said.
Due to expensive batteries, the all-electric car model is still not economically viable in many countries. However, it has flourished in places where government subsidies have cut down the cost of the car, as in California.
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