Both Nissan and Mitsubishi plan significant expansions to their gobal electric vehicle charging networks by next year, according to the Nikkei business daily.
The newspaper, which doesn’t cite its sources, suggests that Nissan plans to add a further 100 US dealerships to the existing 24 west coast dealers that have chargers for its Leaf EV by next April.
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Meanwhile, Mitsubishi will double the number of its domestic dealers with rapid chargers for its i-MiEV from the existing 288 by next April. The company is also planning to make its EV charging service available 24 hours a day by the end of this fiscal year.
The Nikkei quotes research by the Nomura Research Institute estimating that there are about a combined 225,000 electric vehicles in use in Japan, Europe, the US and China. The institute forecasts this will be over 1m by 2020.
The business daily notes that only 70,000 Leafs and 16,000 i-MiEVs have been sold globally, figures that are below the manufacturers’ original forecasts.
