Nissan doesn’t have much in the way of hybrids today, though that’s due to change over the next 12 months. First, we’re getting the Rogue Plug-In Hybrid. Yeah, it’s a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, and Nissan isn’t pretending otherwise. But it’s what the company intends to do beyond the badge-swapped Outlander that is particularly interesting, when the next-generation Rogue with Nissan’s own E-Power hybrid system lands for the 2027 model year.
Most conventional hybrids are parallel hybrids, in that their gas engines and electric motors can operate together or alone. Typically, you want that electric power for low-speed, stop-go city driving, and the ICE to kick in on the highway. But the E-Power system is different: It’s a series hybrid configuration, or what some would call an extended-range EV setup, and you can’t plug it in.
This is the tech that will underpin the Rogue E-Power when it hits the market, likely late next year. It’ll employ a gas engine whose sole job is to generate energy to send either to the wheels through an inverter, or to a battery. It’s not an unprecedented approach by any means—this is how the old BMW i3 REx worked, for example—but it is a unique one for a volume seller like the Rogue.
“The weakness of a series hybrid is when you’re on a highway at 75 mph—then an electric motor is not at its most efficient, but an internal combustion engine is.” Nissan Americas SVP, Chief Product and Planning Officer Ponz Pandikuthira explained during a media briefing. “And so they have a clutch system that allows the upper shaft from the internal combustion engine to drive the final axle.”
What Pandikuthira described is how Honda’s two-motor hybrid system in the Civic and CR-V works. The engine doesn’t introduce itself to the wheels until you’re traveling along at cruising speed, and it does so in a fixed gear.
“Now, we haven’t done that,” Pandikuthira said. “There’s some key reasons for it. So one, the moment you talk about an engine that’s connected to the drivetrain, there’s a lot of vibrations that come in with adding a transmission and therefore reducing the speed, or a lockup clutch. It’s this complexity of cost that’s going into the system.
“But if you manage the calibration correctly, of how that internal combustion engine produces electrons, and the rate at which it’s producing, and the rate at which the battery is depleted, we don’t need that lockup. That’s exactly the development that delayed us from bringing [the second-generation E-Power system available in Europe] to the U.S., and we waited until generation three.”
It’s a bold bet. Only briefly, from 2017 to 2020, did Nissan market a Rogue Hybrid here in North America. By waiting as long as it has to reintroduce an electrified compact SUV to the buyers, it’s lost out on sales its competitors have swooped up. That’s essentially the reason why the Rogue Plug-In Hybrid is happening at all, the way Pandikuthira tells it. “There’s a lot of people who just go online looking for a Rogue. They like the design, but if you don’t have a hybrid, they don’t even come in.”
The plug-in will be a “bridge product,” to use Nissan’s terminology, to its homegrown hybrids. And when the next-gen Rogue does arrive, it’ll initially only be available in E-Power guise—the full ICE version will arrive later. Nissan might’ve taken its sweet time getting to this point, but now that it’s about to, it’s going all in.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
