Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi outline £19bn EV plan

The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance has confirmed a €23 billion (£19bn) investment in electrification over the next five years as it seeks to strengthen the partnership between the three brands.

The money will be spent on expanding the common electric platforms available to brands within the Alliance from four to five after the introduction of a small EV platform for use from 2024 for European models such as the forthcoming Renault R5 and newly announced replacement for the Nissan Micra. Both cars will be engineered by Renault and built in its ElectriCity network of plants in northern France.

The new CMF-BEV platform was described as a “game-changer” by Renault CEO Luca de Meo, who said it reduces costs by 33% compared with the platform currently used by the Renault Zoe. “It will be the key to democratise electric cars,” he said. “For the very first time, EVs will be able to compete with internal combustion engines in this segment.”

Renault said more than 60% of components will be carried over from the CMF-B platform, which underpins cars such as the Renault Clio and Nissan Juke.

The platform will underpin five cars from Nissan, Renault, Alpine and Dacia and volumes will reach 250,000 cars a year, de Meo said. The relatively low volumes suggest it will be a Europe-only platform.

The CMF-EV platform that underpins the delayed Nissan Ariya SUV and the new Renault Mégane E-Tech Electric will be global and eventually span 15 models for five brands, including Nissan, Renault, Mitsubishi, Infiniti and Alpine, totalling 1.5 million sales by 2030. The platform will be used by around half of the 35 pure EV models that the Alliance intends to sell globally by 2030.

“The adaptability allows us to develop sedans to SUVs and sports cars on this platform,” Makoto Uchida, CEO of Nissan, said.

The Alliance has previously said the platform can accommodate cars from 4.0m to 4.7m in length and can fit batteries of 40kWh, 60kWh and 87kWh.

The three Alliance brands are also sharing software platforms. It will roll out the Google automotive ecosystem in its cars, starting with the Mégane E-Tech Electric and rolling out to Nissan and other brands. “The Alliance will also be the first global mass-market OEM to introduce the Google ecosystem in its car,” it said in a statement.

The Alliance will launch its first so-called ‘software-defined’ vehicle in 2025 using powerful central computer chips that can be updated over the air and allow the brands to “unbundle software from hardware”, de Meo said. That will allow the company to reduce the development time for digital services from “more than one year to one week”, de Meo said.

 The Alliance said three million cars are already connected to the Alliance Cloud and that will rise to five million new connected cars per year by 2026.  

The three companies also clarified their common battery strategy and promised production capacity of 220GWh in the future. Nissan and Renault have signed agreements with Chinese maker Envision to partner on new plants in Sunderland and in France to supply batteries.

The Alliance promised a reduction in battery costs of 50% in 2026 and 65% by 2028 from current levels. It also gave further details on its planned solid-state roll-out from 2028, led by Nissan under the Alliance's ‘leader-follower’ strategy.