ON Tuesday, at Nissan’s headquarters in Tokyo, Carlos Ghosn will present the next five-year plan for the carmaker that is vying to be Japan’s second largest. Ghosn will say he has looked into the future — and it is electric.

In a business under growing environmental pressure and beset by the ever-rising cost of oil, Nissan regards its commitment to the commercialisation of electric cars as the most important development in the industry.

It sees potential for boosting sales of conventional cars in Russia, China, India and South America, but regards the car markets in Europe and Japan as essentially static and predicts further weakening of sales in North America. Hence the emphasis on electric.

Ghosn is the man who brought Nissan back from the brink. The company was close to collapse when Renault, majority owned by the French government, came to the rescue in 1999 and formed an alliance with it. Ghosn, a vice- president of Renault, got the job of turning Nissan round.

Nobody gave him much chance of success, but Ghosn’s revival plan, followed by his Nissan 180 plan (1m more vehicles a year, 8% operating profit, zero debt), restored the company to robust health and made him a hero in Japan. When Renault president Louis Schweitzer — the architect of the Nissan alliance — retired in 2005, Ghosn was made chief executive of both Renault and Nissan.

Nissan has not done so well since then, although it is still one of the more profitable of the world’s carmakers. The last three-year plan set a target for annual sales of 4.2m vehicles by 2007: in reality they were 3.6m. Ghosn’s high ambitions for Renault are also proving hard to achieve.

Speaking at an international product review in Portugal, Ghosn was confident Nissan’s future progress would come from innovation: “The period of revival and retooling of the past eight years is over. We’ve made massive investment, renewed everything: it’s done. Nissan lost its way with technology in the 1990s and became disconnected from what the consumer wanted. Now we have reconnected.”

Nissan is sharing its electric- car expertise with its partner Renault and using the French brand. Ghosn has made an exclusive deal to supply cars to Israel as part of a state- backed venture that includes creating a network of roadside stations where cars can recharge their batteries.

Israel’s plan to be the first nation to encourage large- scale use of electric cars was developed after Ghosn met President Shimon Peres at last year’s Davos economic summit and heard of the infrastructure proposals of Shai Agassi, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who runs an initiative called Project Better Place.

Having no oil and being a small country where typical car journeys are short, Israel is regarded as an ideal testing ground for electric cars. The infrastructure will be in place by 2011 and, to encourage consumers to use electric cars, the government has set the purchase tax on them at 10%, rather than the regular 72%.

Ghosn sees Israel as the model for similar deals in other countries and Renault- Nissan and Project Better Place have since announced an initiative in Denmark, which will provide tax breaks for zero-emission vehicles from 2011. There has even been a serious enquiry from one of the oil-rich Gulf states.

Elsewhere, Ghosn expects the first plug-in Nissans will be sold to firms and fleets in 2010 and be available in the mass market by 2012. Nissan and Renault will offer a range of electric vehicles at prices equivalent to today’s petrol or diesel-engined models. The lithium-ion batteries that will give the cars a range of up to 120 miles will not be included, but leased separately.

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