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Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. (NASDAQ: NSANY) really wants to come out with new hybrid and all-electric vehicles in the next few years. However, throw out the terms biodiesel and ethanol at the Japanese automaker and you'll probably receive a scornful look back. Does Nissan want to bet on the all-electric vehicle instead of mixed-propulsion methods like combustion based on ethanol and biodiesel? You bet.

As many critics have pointed out (and there is quite a bit of validity to this), the economic returns on the uses of those two alternative fuels are not that good, even with foreign oil prices being at the level that they are currently. Nissan officials said this week that designing an ethanol or biodiesel car is fairly straightforward in a technical sense. Yet, the cost of the fuel and the resources needed to distill it into a form usable by these alternative-fuel engines would outpace regular gasoline with all variables considered.

Are you ready to actually pay more to travel in order to use a non-oil form of fuel? That's what Nissan execs are hinting out here, even as E85 vehicles continue making inroads with competitors like General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM) and others. The costs of using cropland for fuel production instead of food production are also on the minds of many (in the case of ethanol). But electric cars -- today -- are nowhere near close to replacing internal combustion vehicles in terms of performance or cost. Nissan, though, hopes that they will be in the next decade or two. Right now, the automaker sees its first mass-produced electric car in 2011 or 2012.

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