Nissan Quickcharger: Half The Size At Half The Price

[AVANTI R5]

If you want to charge your Nissan Leaf in 30 minutes, Nissan will (at least in Japan) sell you (reluctantly) a pricy quickcharger. It costs about half of what a U.S. Leaf costs – before incentives and rebates: The current quickcharger sets you back 1.47 million yen, in today’s dollars, that’s about $19,000. Soon, this will get considerably, well, more reasonable. Nissan today announced a quickcharger with the same performance, but at half the size and half the price of the old one.

According to an emailed statement by Nissan, “the newly-developed quick charging unit retains the high performance of the current quick charger manufactured by Nissan,” but will “take up less space and enable easier installation.” A final price is not set. However, Nissan says that the unit will “cost significantly less than one million yen,” and “the base specification unit will cost only below one half the price of the current unit.” That would be around $8.500 – in Japan, including tax.

The new unit complies with the CHAdeMO protocol and is rated at a hefty 49kW at “3- AC200V” (which I assume means 200V 3phase). It produces 500V DC at 125 Amps. Apart from the base unit, a (pricier) outdoor unit and one for cold climes are available. All share the same electrical specs.

Still, the quickcharger is not expected to be a fast moving item. Nissan aims to sell 5,000 of the new quick chargers by March 2016 (!!!). The target market is Nissan dealerships, local government facilities and “locations that draw large numbers of customers in regions throughout Japan.”

The U.S. and Europe will get the charger at some point. Given high enough quantities, the price can drop considerably . A DC welder with similar ratings can be had for less that $1,000.

* Registered users of the site do not see these ads.