At Nissan, performance has a name: NISMO, for Nissan Motorsports. With electrification, some wondered what the future of this division would look like. The company responded with the LEAF NISMO RC, a dramatically styled track-car concept that has been used mostly as a lead car in various race presentations.
It appears that wasn’t the end of the company’s plans for NISMO. Guillaume Cartier, the president of Nissan Europe, confirmed to Top Gear that there will be high-performance NISMO versions of electric models in the future. However, it is not known which model will be the first to get this revised treatment, or when.
“Nismo is an asset that we have and that’s something we want to revitalize. And will we have some, let’s say, cars with the derivative Nismo? The answer is yes.”
- Guillaume Cartier, president of Nissan Europe
He executive said that electric creations bearing the NISMO letters would have their suspension and powertrain reworked, similar to the formula applied to gasoline-powered NISMO models.
And Nissan is taking seriously the performance angle, he added. “It’s not a gimmick. To use an English expression, it’s not lipstick on a pig. So that requires some investment to make sure that you bring performance.”
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The company will still be able to build on what it has done with the Leaf NISMO RC, which features a 161-hp, dual electric motor configuration. With four-wheel drive, the model is capable of reaching 100 km/h in just 3.4 seconds.
In addition, François Bailly, Nissan's senior vice president of product planning for the AMIEO region (Africa, Middle East, India, Europe and Oceania), recently expressed interest in building an electrified sports car equipped with solid-state batteries, which is currently under development at Nissan. However, he indicated that this project is not the top priority at this time.
Nissan currently has a prototype for its solid-state battery. A production model using this technology should be available in 2028, the company says.
That's still a long way off, so we’ll see what happens.
Before then, starting in 2023, Nissan plans to introduce only electrified vehicles in Europe. These models will eventually replace the current internal-combustion-engine models. By 2026, the company wants 75 percent of its sales in Europe to be electrified models.
In the United States, Nissan's Canton, Mississippi plant will begin building two electric vehicles in 2025. One will be Nissan-branded, the other an Infiniti product. The battery packs for those models will also come from that facility.
