In the early 00's, the EU introduced emmissions regulations focused on Carbon, which didn't take sulphur into account. That's why Volkswagen and others like Mercedes focused so heavily on small diesel turbo engines, and explains the 2005-2010 or so diesel vehicle boom.

American manufacturers mostly just made big gas sonking vehicles running on petrol

Japanese manufacturers developed the Prius and other hybrid-electric products and were early to the game. Remember that the Toyota Prius Hybrid Electric vehicle was released in 1997. 1997! They currently sell four million units a year of Prius alone, and definitely have the knowledge + capacity to mass produce EV's

All else remaining equal who will buy a car you have to drive when you can avoid it, not least to add taxi, trucking and delivery service fleet purchases.

In addition as this market progresses I imagine accidents per km will become a huge purchase decision when self driving is more commonplace so quality of system will be huge. Not many are going to buy the cars that have 3x the accidents or too many famous mess ups.

Batteries are important but if I was an auto manufacturer the self driving component would keep me up at night.

What self driving component? TFA is about batteries.

If you mean, self driving is a bigger competitive advantage, and that's a bigger risk to Toyota/Japan Inc... well, no.

Tesla sold 0.5M vehicles last year and is having trouble scaling up. The total addressable market is over 100M vehicles per year, and self driving isn't going to be a factor in most people's purchase decisions for at least a decade. (More cars are sold in Asia than in the USA.)

> I imagine accidents per km will become a huge purchase decision when self driving is more commonplace.

Accidents are reduced by advanced vehicle safety systems: "self stopping", not self driving. Those systems can be fitted--even retrofitted--to any vehicle. [Edit: and they are being fitted to more and more vehicles.] This is one of the most sad and tired arguments for self driving.

Tesla’s CAGR on number of vehicles produced from 2014 to 2020 has been 55%.

> “To put this number in perspective, Microsoft first broke $3 billion in sales in fiscal year 1993, generating $3.7 billion in revenue. ...Six years later Microsoft did $19.7 billion in revenue, which was a CAGR of 32.1%.”

Sustaining 55% CAGR for 6 years after hitting $3 billion is mind-numbing face-melting software monopoly level growth beyond what even M$FT achieved in its glory days.

It was thought this level of compound annual growth was simply just beyond the realm of possibility in the automotive sector, let alone the EV automotive sector.

Not ideal for the environment, admittedly.

I agree that Japanese auto makers are not yet very serious in all this. I shall know, I was in the market for an EV and bought an hybrid because I didn't find anything in my price range, and the charging infrastructure in Japan is still severely lacking.

Maybe it's because they are king in hybrid technology? So don't want/feel the need to switch. Cars are not a social network, it's the opposite of a winner take all market, so it probably doesn't matter much if they are not early in the market.

On the software side if Tesla masters the self-driving car aspect then it's a completely different story. On the other hands if the technology comes from Apple or Alphabet, I think all car makers will be able to access the technology. Especially if it's Alphabet.

[1] Volkswagen Group includes the brands Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche.

[2] https://insideevs.com/news/465956/in-2020-volkswagen-group-s...

So they are looking at 50k cars compared to 500k Tesla ships. This is something these car companies needed to start doing yesterday.