First outside Japan, Nissan begins assembly of e-Power hybrid batteries in Thailand

The assembly of Nissan’s e-Power battery has started at the Nissan Powertrain Thailand (NPT) plant in Samutprakarn province, making it the first e-Power battery assembly line outside of Japan.

Isao Sekiguchi, president of Nissan Thailand added, “Thailand is a key market for Nissan in ASEAN, and under the Nissan NEXT transformation plan, Thailand has become the company’s Southeast Asian production hub. Following our investment in 2020 with the production of the Kicks e-Power for domestic and export markets, including Japan, we have begun the local assembly of the KICKS e-Power battery in Thailand,"

The NPT production line that assembles the e-Power high voltage battery has innovative and efficient quality control management. It has an interlocking process of 100 percent with high accuracy equipment that helps to check every step of the assembly to eliminate errors to zero.

The line also features a real-time production control system and 100 percent of the assembly data is recorded and stored for tracking.

Also read: Why it’s difficult for ETCM to offer the Nissan Note e-Power in Malaysia

Besides assembly of the e-Power high voltage battery, the NPT plant also produces the 1.0-litre turbo engine in the Nissan Almera, and the 1.2-litre petrol and 2.3-liter turbodiesel engines found in the Nissan Kicks e-Power and Navara respectively. NPT has a maximum of 580,000 units of overall production capacity per year.

To recap, the Nissan e-Power drivetrain is a series hybrid unlike Honda's (i-MMD) parallel hybrid or series-parallel ones like Toyota's.

In the case of Nissan’s e-Power, the engine doesn't drive the wheels and is only used as a generator to charge the high voltage battery, as opposed to parallel and series-parallel hybrids where the engine can both drive the wheels and charge the high voltage battery.

Nissan’s e-Power hybrid powertrain currently features in the Nissan Note and Nissan Kicks SUV, the latter having been previously touted for a Malaysian launch sometime in 2022.

Also read: 2022 Nissan Kicks e-Power is heading to Malaysia, teased in ETCM ad

Also read: Nissan Note e-Power: We drove Malaysia's most fuel-efficient car that you can't buy (yet); 2.8L/100km