Nissan Motor Co. temporarily halted development of the first electric car for the Infiniti luxury brand, a bet that more advanced and cheaper technology soon will be available, company executives said.
The Japanese auto maker showed the battery-powered Infiniti LE concept at the New York International Auto Show in April 2012, and said then that a version of the five-seat sedan would be on sale within two years.
Andy Palmer, executive vice president of Nissan and in charge of global product planning, said in an interview that Nissan now sees advances in electric-vehicle technology just over the horizon that are worth waiting for. He didn't specify what the advances were.
"Certain technologies that we see now, which we didn't see two years ago, are going to be available in a time frame that was relatively close to where we were going to introduce the Infiniti," Mr. Palmer said. "Rather than miss those opportunities, and then have to reconfigure the car to adopt them in its life cycle, what we wanted to do is to bring those from the beginning."
Mr. Palmer said the company has decided to "push back the timing a little bit in order to give accessibility to those particular new innovations" in the first LE model. He didn't commit to a new release date.
Nissan, like its major rivals, is under pressure from government policy makers to expand sales of electric vehicles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution. Other luxury car brands, including BMW AG, General Motors Co.'s Cadillac and Tesla Motors Inc., are aiming plug-in models at affluent consumers.
Sales of all-electric cars such as Nissan's Leaf so far have accounted for a small slice of the global car market, mainly because current battery technology can't compete with the low cost and long driving range of internal combustion engines.
Electric cars cost up to $10,000 more than similar gasoline-powered cars, he said.
Nissan has sold about 65,000 Leaf cars world-wide since the car went on sale in December 2010. Nissan sold 9,839 Leafs in the U.S. through the first six months of this year. U.S. sales recently have been spurred by a price cut that brings the Leaf's starting price to $29,750 before a federal tax credit of up to $7,500.
Mr. Palmer said growing demand for electric cars is prompting more innovation in the engineering and vendor base, leading to drops in costs for electric vehicle technology, he said.
"This [Leaf] is not a niche car anymore. What that is doing is stimulating the engineering environment and the supply environment a lot of innovation," he said. "As you would expect you saw it with air bags, ABS, it starts very expensive and rapidly comes down through the innovation and becomes very affordable." Mr. Palmer declined to give any time frame for the commercial introduction of the Infiniti LE. The concept model shown in 2012 was based on the same underpinnings as the Leaf, the auto maker said at the time.
A spokesman for Infiniti said separately that the company wants to focus its resources on developing smaller luxury vehicles to take on rivals such as Audi AG, BMW and Daimler AG's Mercedes-Benz unit in the subcompact and compact segments. He said Infiniti will introduce a vehicle in 2015 to compete with Audi's A3 hatchback.
Mr. Palmer said Nissan would like to sell its electric vehicles in India and that the initial issue of operating electric car batteries in Indian conditions where temperatures are relatively high have been largely resolved.
Nissan wants the Indian government to offer financial incentives on sale of electric cars, similar to those offered in the U.S., U.K., Japan, Ireland and Norway to encourage the sale of such vehicles.
