Rogue

Make
Nissan
Segment
SUV

Nissan wants its future electric vehicles to be more familiar, which is why the Juke, Rogue, and Rogue Sport will be electrified and introduced in 2025. Nissan's European boss spoke with Autocar, who revealed that this step toward electrifying existing models is based on the popularity of the Japanese brand's e-Power hybrid powertrain.

This unique hybrid system helped Nissan grow Qashqai (Rogue Sport in America) sales by a significant chunk last year. Unlike a typical plug-in hybrid, the Qashqai e-Power hybrid uses an ICE powertrain to power the battery, which powers the electric motor.

The setup, which Audi also used to power its electric Dakar Rally competitor, was easier to adopt than the traditional battery-electric setup, and therein lies the secret.

According to Nissan Europe's CEO, Guillaume Cartier, the e-Power hybrid powertrain will aid the push to EVs.

"The point is we go in a transition manner, in a smart manner, with e-Power, then to BEV," said Cartier. "We're just launching e-Power [now]. We need to take the benefit of it on Qashqai. We have evolved, so this is something that it's natural to look at, which would be the future."

Nissan will also rely on electrification to make the flailing X-Trail (Rogue in America) more interesting. In 2021, Nissan only sold 2,380 Rogues in Europe. The Nissan Ariya, which wasn't even available for an entire year, sold 3,182 units. There's obviously an appetite for EVs in Europe, possibly due to its strict legislation, which, for the record, is not banning internal combustion as you may have been led to believe.

The Rogue and Rogue Sport EV will likely ride on the Common Module Family (CMF) platform designed by the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance. We're going to see many exciting EVs come out of this deal, mainly on the Mitsubishi side.

Nissan currently uses this platform for the Nissan Ariya. Still, we wonder if people would be more willing to buy an electric vehicle if it was based on a known product, like the Rogue and Rogue Sport.

The Japanese brand wants EVs to represent more than half of its sales by 2030 until it eventually goes fully electric in the 2030s. This new strategy also matches what Alfonso Albaisa, Nissan's senior vice president of global design, told CarBuzz at the 2022 New York Motor Show. He said he was excited to move away from building standalone EVs like the Leaf and Ariya and moving on to electrifying legacy models like the Pathfinder, Frontier, and even the Z.