but even here it has taken years for the hev toyota prius to get to its current levels of sales about m cars a year globally the explicit terms of the contract are just an outline as there are implicit terms and understandings which determine the behaviour of the parties the potential for returns from such new markets have motivated renaultnissan to invest more than billion in developing marketready electric vehicles and other carmakers have followed this logic in developing electric vehicles as part of their own investment strategy in a similar vein the parisbased network of shareduse stationbased electric cars autolib has been fully financed by the bollore group which specialises in battery technology and vehiclebased it systems case study