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Nissan Leaf sales get January jump as Chevy Volt trends downward

The cold January sales dip hit both the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt last month, but when compared 2014 to 2013's first-month-of-the-year sales totals, one of the two early plug-in vehicles obviously came out on top. The top Leaf market also shifted away from Atlanta for the first time in months. Last year, the Leaf sold just 650 units in January, but it managed to move 1,252 last month, a 92.6-percent increase over 2013 but a big drop from the 2,529 sold in December 2013. Paige Presley over at Nissan told AutoblogGreen that the Leaf has now broken sales records for 11 months straight and that, "we see unique seasonality with some December pull-ahead demand based on federal and state tax incentives." The number one Leaf market also shifted away from Atlanta for the first time in months, moving back to San Francisco. That change could be short-lived. "We had some inventory constraint issues early in the month in Atlanta with end-of-year demand depleting stock," Presley said. "By the time we resolved that, the weather hampered sales." There was not as much good news on the Chevrolet front. Last month, the Volt sold 918 units, down from 1,140 in January 2013 and 2,392 in December 2013. It also marks the first time the Volt has sold in the three-digit range since January 2012, when it sold 603 copies. That string of solid months means that the plug-in hybrid has a roughly 12,000-unit lead over the EV since the two cars brought plug-in vehicles back to the mass market all the way back in December 2010. We will have our full report of January's green car sales up soon.

Nissan pulling Facebook ads over hate speech concerns

The system for advertising on Facebook allows companies to target specific demographics with ads that follow people based on their personal information, but as some companies have been finding out lately, this could lead to their ads showing up on questionable pages. According to Automotive News and The New York Times, Nissan has joined a growing list of companies that has pulled its advertising until the social media giant can guarantee that the ads won't appear on offensive pages.
This issue came about as a result of a group calling for Facebook to ban gender-based hate speech that went unchecked on some fan pages. Apparently, some of these offensive pages even showed images of women being abused. We won't post the names of the offensive pages, but you can find some of them listed on the NYT article, though it looks like most of the pages have since been removed. As for Nissan, AN says that the only ads it had at the time were for Nissan UK, and there is no telling how this issue will affect Facebook advertising in the future.

Nissan sees its EV sales surging to 1 million annually by 2022

YOKOHAMA, Japan — Nissan announced plans to sell 1 million electric vehicles (EVs) annually by 2022, a six-fold jump from what it sold last year, and said it had no plans to stop testing its self-driving cars on public roads, calling them safe. Japan's No. 2 automaker and its rivals are planning to crank up development and production of electric cars in response to tightening emissions regulations around the world, even as demand for such vehicles remains limited due to their high cost and limited charging infrastructure. Launched as the world's first mass-market all-battery EV in 2010, Nissan's Leaf compact hatchback is the world's best-selling EV, though sales have been just around 300,000 units in its lifetime. The company now plans to focus its lower-emissions lineup on all-battery and gasoline-hybrid EVs rather than costlier technologies including plug-in hybrids. Nissan said on Friday it would develop eight new all-battery EVs over the next five years, including four models for China. Its luxury Infiniti brand would begin carrying new electric models from 2021, it added. Through 2022, vehicles powered by its "e-Power" gasoline-hybrid technology would likely comprise the majority of Nissan's electric line-up, it said. Such vehicles use gasoline to power the car's motor, requiring a much smaller battery than EVs and therefore are less expensive to produce. "The heart of our strategy in terms of electrification is battery EVs and e-Power technology," Nissan Chief Planning Officer Philippe Klein told reporters at a briefing. Concerns about EV battery costs and components have prompted many automakers to develop a variety of lower emissions technologies, but Klein said that Nissan would largely forego plug-in hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell technologies, given their low cost-performance at the moment. In 2017, Nissan sold 163,000 electric vehicles globally. Nissan and its automaking partners, Renault and Mitsubishi, together plan to launch 17 electric models as part of their strategy to achieve annual vehicle sales totaling 14 million units by 2022, compared with 10.6 million units in 2017. Self-driving tests to continue Automakers and technology companies are facing mounting pressure to prove that their automated driving functions under development are safe to use on public roads following a fatal accident involving a self-driving car operated by Uber Technologies [UBER.UL] in the United States earlier this week.