Feb 21 2014

Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay and Mr Ghosn announced the agreement on Friday, after initial meetings late last year between the two men to hammer out the details of the deal.

Mr Tobgay, whose penchant for electric vehicles is seen in the country as one of the leader’s “pet projects”, has also been in touch with other electric vehicle makers including Tesla of the US. Bhutan, a mountainous and largely Buddhist nation squeezed between India and China, is known for championing gross national happiness (GNH) instead of focusing merely on gross domestic product.

 

“This is a showcase. It’s a very important initiative taken by one country to really promote its economic development based on clean transportation,” Mr Ghosn said.

“Bhutan was the first country to ban smoking,” Mr Ghosn said. “After Bhutan, many others followed, and now its practically global . . . This support for electric cars can also be avant-garde. Many other emerging markets have similar attributes.”

The Leaf is the world’s biggest Japanese Used Cars Exporter, with more than 100,000 sales – 45 per cent of the entire electric vehicle market.

 

Nissan will supply the government of Bhutan with hundreds of its electric Leaf cars in an initiative to raise the profile of electric vehicles and support the Himalayan country’s attempts to become a zero-emissions pioneer.

The Japanese carmaker, the world’s biggest manufacturer of electric cars, will provide Leafs for official government use and as public taxis, in the first project of its kind anywhere in the world.

 

Carlos Ghosn, Nissan chief executive, said: “Bhutan is a perfect example of a country with plenty of electricity, that does not want to import too much oil, promote its economic development, but not at the expense of its environment . . . The electric car is the perfect solution that marries all its goals.”Nissan will supply a few hundred Leafs to Bhutan initially, with ambitions to sell more than 1,000 in the near term, Mr Ghosn added. Nissan will also build a network of electric car chargers in the country.

 

But sales of the car, with the exception of Norway, have largely underperformed expectations, with customers wary of buying an electric vehicle without enough charging and support infrastructure. Mr Ghosn, also chief executive of Renault, said in November that slower than expected sales of electric cars meant previous sales projections for 2016 would probably only be hit by the end of the decade.

 

Environmental sustainability is an important part of the GNH philosophy, and the country is keen to curb its air pollution levels, reduce its trade deficit due to oil imports and make use of its large hydroelectric power generation. Nissan sees the project as a means to promote the technology to other markets.