Renault-Nissan Alliance Plug-In Electric Vehicle Sales Pass 480,000

There have now been more than 480,000 plug-in electric vehicles sold worldwide by the Renault-Nissan Alliance, as of the end of the first half of 2017, going by a new press release from the Alliance.

What that means, to be clearer, is that Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi have together sold nearly 500,000 plug-in electric vehicles worldwide. Actually, considering that it’s late in July now, the Alliance might have now sold more than half a million plug-in electric vehicles worldwide.

While that number is fairly impressive, there’s definitely room for growth — the Alliance sold 5,268,079 vehicles worldwide during just the first six months of 2017, after all. It’s interesting to note that Tesla is aiming to be doing over 500,000 units a year in sales within a few years — I wonder what sorts of exact sales goals CEO Carlos Ghosn has for plug-in electric vehicles?

With the rapidly approaching launch of the new, refreshed Nissan LEAF, sales should improve considerably over the coming months for the Alliance (as regards plug-in electric vehicles). Though, it remains to be seen how much the launch of the Tesla Model 3 will eat into potential sales.

With regard to the Alliance’s best-selling plug-in electric vehicle models to date, there are no surprises there — the Nissan LEAF, the Renault ZOE, and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV. Those names should be “unsurprising” because they are pretty much all that’s on offer in many markets — presumably, if the companies were to begin releasing more models, including some SUVs for instance, then sales would increase as well…