Nissan is aiming directly at the sweet spot of mass-market cars with the price of its all-electric Nissan Leaf, due to come out later this year.

The company said Tuesday that, including a tax credit for electric cars, the price of a Leaf would be $25,280. The actual price of the car will be $32,780, but there’s a $7,500 income-tax credit for those who buy electric cars.

"Now we're going to learn how consumers will react," Mark Perry, director of product planning and advanced technology at Nissan North America, told reporters.

Nissan is one of several automakers with plans for electric cars. Notably, General Motors is rolling out its Volt—an electric car with a supplemental gasoline engine—later this year. But the price point on Nissan’s offering is considerably less than is expected of the Volt, which is expected to cost in the $40,000-plus range, though GM has not yet announced a price. The Volt will also be eligible for the tax credit, bringing that price down somewhat, though not as low as the Leaf.

GM is aiming its Volt at a different market to begin with. It’s loaded the Volt with gadgets and technical tricks, like the ability to communicate with smartphones, and is expected to price it to appeal to early-adopting enthusiasts.

Of course, Nissan is also offering a car that will have the limited range of an electric car before the infrastructure is in place for quick and easy recharging of its batteries. The Volt sidesteps that issue with a gasoline engine that will recharge its batteries while on the go.

For another $2,200, customers can buy a home charging dock for the Leaf, which will have to be recharged after 100 miles. Half of that cost can also be defrayed by tax credits, similar to those for buying the car. And the cost of running the Leaf on electricity will be about one sixth that of running a gasoline-powered car.

While the Nissan car is aimed at the mass market, it is more expensive than gasoline cars of similar size, like the Ford Focus and the Honda Civic.

Nissan’s Leaf and GM’s Volt is an interesting first step by the major automakers into the world of electric automobiles. As a candidate for the White House, Barack Obama promised that there would be a million electric vehicles on American roads by 2015. The tax credits are a sign that he was serious about that pledge.

Carlos Ghosn, the head of the Nissan-Renault alliance, has said he expects adoption of electric vehicles to be a slow process, with only 10 percent of the cars sold worldwide running on electricity.

That’s a fairly conservative, and probably sensible, estimate for electric-car adoption.

But it’s one that Alan Salzman, CEO of Vantage Point Ventures—a venture capital firm that has backed both electric sports-carmaker Tesla, and Better Place, a Silicon Valley startup that has plans to build stations where batteries can be swapped in electric cars, avoiding the wait time of recharging—thinks may be a bit too cautious.

“I would say they’re not optimistic enough,” Salzman told Portfolio.com. “Twenty years forward seems like three lifetimes. But 20 years backwards seems not that long ago, right?”

The Internet, for practical purposes, really didn’t exist in 1990, and even 10 years ago, the proliferation of such services as Facebook would have been unthinkable, he said. His point is that once a new technology gains a toehold, it can advance like wildfire as companies learn to produce it better, faster, and cheaper.

“I would say you will get to the tipping point around the end of this decade, 2020, and then it will go very rapidly,” he said.

Right now, cars like the Leaf or the Volt, or even the Tesla, are just the first generation of electric vehicles, Salzman said. And, similar to other new technologies, infrastructure will spring up to support them, the cost of manufacturing will drop, and the products themselves will improve.

All of that will add up to widespread adoption.

“I think the inevitability is simply based on it’s cheaper and better,” Salzman said. “Picture two cars side by side, identical in every way. One’s electric, one’s combustion: So one’s cheaper, faster, and has zero emissions. Who wants the slow, smelly, expensive version? I think 100 percent of the people want the clean, cheap, faster version.”

Whether Salzman is right, or Ghosn is, they’re both betting on one thing. The electric vehicle has arrived. And they’re gambling that the public will, after its 100-year love affair with the gasoline-powered car, be ready for something completely new.

---

Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com