Nissan : 6,000 (Japanese) orders to be delivered by Mar 31 ?

http://www.just-auto.com/news/production-process-slows-early-nissan-leaf-deliveries_id108526.aspx

JAPAN: Production process slows early Nissan Leaf deliveries

Nissan has only delivered around 60 Leaf electric cars even though it has already taken 6,000 orders due to be shipped by 31 March, the company said today.

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I think the 60 deliveries are for Japan. But my guess is that 6,000 orders is worldwide.

It makes sense that they want to ship these many by Mar '31 - which is their financial year end.

Shipped by 31 March = Delivered in April to mid-May?

@Evnow

My read is that Nissan is admitting that they have delivered only 60 LEAF cars WORLDWIDE. I am also at least trying to follow Japanese and European deliveries, and I don't see ANY real numbers going to those settings either. US deliveries started BEFORE those of Japan, and as far as I can tell only absolutely token few cars have gotten into customer hands in the land of the rising sun.

Let's then do the math for what it would take in terms of actual production output for "6,000 orders to be delivered by March 31."

There are about 50 weekdays between now and 31 March, so that computes out to be daily production of 60 cars per day for the entire time. This must then be adjusted to SUBTRACT shipping days for "delivered by March 31" for at least 40% (just an estimate, of course) of those cars going to the US; shipping time to the US would be about 10 days, so that reduces the output days to 40 days for US cars and for those going to Japanese consumers, maybe a 5 day transit from factory to delivery which reduces for maybe the remainder 60% of the cars to 45 production days. My US shipping estimate does not even take into account the 4-10 day delay from port to dealer once the cars arrive at the LA, Portland or Seattle docks.

This means that the daily production output must be more like 70-90 cars/day to get that target 6000 cars available for shipping and delivery by 31 March in the two major markets where the car is supposed to be selling.

Yes, that 75cars/day is a reasonable expected output for a smooth running production line, but we still have no clue why for the previous 3 months the output has been less than 1car/day, do we?

GeorgeParrott said:

My read is that Nissan is admitting that they have delivered only 60 LEAF cars WORLDWIDE. I am also at least trying to follow Japanese and European deliveries, and I don't see ANY real numbers going to those settings either. US deliveries started BEFORE those of Japan, and as far as I can tell only absolutely token few cars have gotten into customer hands in the land of the rising sun.

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I don't think it is worldwide. Otherwise we would have half of those in the spreadsheet ! We have been told Nissan got 20 in the first batch and 90 in the second to US. Of those 30 have been delivered to forum members.

As for shipping, I think they can ship cars produced right till 3/31. Like all companies they will burn the midnight oil in the days before fiscal year close for that. So, we are talking about nearly 3 months to make 6K cars. In anycase, since the full production rate is about 4K per month, if the production is sufficiently ramped up, they will be able achieve this.

"delivery" could be one of those words with different meanings. From a factory/production side, the parts/equipment only needs to leave the factory property to be considered 'delivered' for their purposes.

If Nissan can get 6000 cars onto boats by the end of March, it'll be a fun summer for a lot of expectant Leaf 'parents'!

Does anyone recall a video from an assembly line where battery modules were being produced? About how often were those modules going down the line, maybe one every minute? Of course there's no way to know how many such production lines they could have but it gives you a lower bound on an estimate.

I syspect that the factory can produce around 60 per HOUR if they want to do so.

actually each line can only produce cars based on the slowest station and i would guess that we are looking at 5-10 cars per hour.

the average is about 7 per hour

I suspect that Nussan knows how to get cars made in quantity.

Slow stations can usually be broken into several sub-operations to speed things up.

Then, the slowest "bottleneck" stations can be replicated to have 2 or 3 in parallel ... to not have most of the plant sit idle most of the time.

You can be sure that they can pump out cars when they want to do it.

back in the Motor City Heydays the river rouge assembly plant for GM was one of the biggest and they boasted one car every 50 some seconds. those were the slap together days where the wiring harness was the most time consuming thing to install and it was installed in stages and in 4 different stations not counting parallel stations.

i dont think any line works that fast anymore. i think they have learned from their mistakes.

I'd go by what Nissan said was the annual capacity - 50K. They may have multiple lines in the plant to make ICE cars - but converted only one to EV+ICE use. For all we know the bottleneck might be the battery.

Yes, they have learned to use less wires, and local micro-controllers.

I think they have only delivered 39 cars in the US. At least that is how many show up at night on the Carwings rankings on-line. The only international one that shows up is from the UK, but does not have any driving history on it. None from Japan show up even though it says "international rankings"
You can also opt out of participating on the on-line rankings, maybe a few have done that so there might be a few more than 39.

hobbyguy said:

You can also opt out of participating on the on-line rankings, maybe a few have done that so there might be a few more than 39.

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I think a lot more than 39 have done that. Also, Japanese carwings may not be integrated with ours.

As I said, there are 32 owners listed in the sheet + 4 December owners not listed there. We definitely don't have 90% of the owners as members of this site.

LTLFTcomposite said:

Does anyone recall a video from an assembly line where battery modules were being produced? About how often were those modules going down the line, maybe one every minute? Of course there's no way to know how many such production lines they could have but it gives you a lower bound on an estimate.

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I talked w/Mark Perry at one of the events (Randy was there, too) and he said that all the batteries 'cure' for like a month after being manufactured where they're tested and such...

I'm with George in thinking that the 60 is worldwide deliveries. There are different dates -- manufacture, ship, and delivery -- and there are probably delays in knowing in Japan when a US delivery occurred. So a delivery might have been completed but Nissan Japan may not have this number yet. Or the interview may have been done a week ago.

I don't see why this matters. Nissan is saying that they'll have manufactured 6000 Leafs by the end of March. That has to be a worldwide number since worldwide production for the year is something like 20,000.

I'm dubious about the 6000 by the end of March. Nissan is behind plan and it's hard to see them going from 0-200 MPH in two seconds. So long at production keeps ramping up we should be happy. You want the car but once you get it the most important factor will be that it's relatively trouble free. No doubt they are doing their best. One thing to keep in mind about Japanese is that there are always lots of maybes and lots of saying "yes" that aren't really a "yes". It's a mistake to think that everything is as definite as the translation suggests. So "we'll manufacture 6000 by the end of March" might be something like "we hope to manufacture 6000 by the end of March".

I also don't see the connection between the production numbers and the reported slow sales in Japan. They seem like completely different issues which the article just lumped together in order to suggest (not tell) a story. At worst the slow sales in Japan would mean that production could be diverted to NA and Europe. Worldwide demand is certainly not falling short.

evnow said:

They may have multiple lines in the plant to make ICE cars - but converted only one to EV+ICE use.

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LEAF is made on the same assembly line as all of the ICE cars. They just insert the motor and battery at the location where they would insert the engine and fuel tank.(Video of LEAF production - go to 2:50 if you don't want to watch the whole five minute video). These plants are big, but they still only have one production line.

SanDust said:

That has to be a worldwide number since worldwide production for the year is something like 20,000.

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Oppama can produce 50,000 LEAFs per year (They are expecting to ramp up to full production of 4,100 cars/month in the second quarter). Smyrna in late 2012 will eventually produce up to 150,000 per year.

From this Nissan press release:
The Oppama plant has an annual production capacity of 50,000 units. Nissan LEAF will start production at Smyrna in late 2012 and at Sunderland in early 2013. At full ramp up, Smyrna will have an annual production capacity of 150,000 units, and Sunderland will have a capacity of 50,000 units.

Spot on Leafguy as usual.

LEAFguy said:

Oppama can produce 50,000 LEAFs per year (They are expecting to ramp up to full production of 4,100 cars/month in the second quarter). Smyrna in late 2012 will eventually produce up to 150,000 per year.

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No one doubts Nissan can produce way more Leafs than they have orders for -- assuming they have the battery packs and other parts. Talking about assembly capacity has no meaning in the absence of the parts needed for the assembly, which have long lead times and delivery schedules. How many Leafs with the cold weather package can they make next week? It's not like they can zip down to PEP boys and get what they need.

Right now Nissan is struggling to produce 6k units a quarter. That's on plan but far short of 38k a quarter. As to why a decent percentage of those 6k cars aren't showing up in the USA, seems like statik has the most credible explanation -- all production is being diverted to Japan in order that deliveries can be made before the EV rebates expire in Japan at the end of March.

If this is true then we'll see a lot of cars starting in April.

evnow said:

hobbyguy said:

You can also opt out of participating on the on-line rankings, maybe a few have done that so there might be a few more than 39.

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I think a lot more than 39 have done that. Also, Japanese carwings may not be integrated with ours.

As I said, there are 32 owners listed in the sheet + 4 December owners not listed there. We definitely don't have 90% of the owners as members of this site.

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It's not even that you can opt out of the Rankings - you have to proactively opt-in.

I agree that we can't possibly have everybody on the forum/in the spreadsheet. But the streaks of continuous or near-continuous VINs make it seem like we might have close to 50%. If I had to bet I'd say there are 90 cars on the ground in the US.