Japan's GDP growth is actually good for an advanced economy, when you index it to the size of the working-age population.[1]
Japan's working-age population has been shrinking for quite a while now.
(China's is peaking about now, so it can expect total growth to slow down. Hence the measures taken by the CCP to try to increase fertility: lifting the one-child policy to three children, introducing tax breaks, limiting for-profit tutoring, and most recently cracking down on alternatives to making babies: video games and on-line shopping and social media.)
1. Japan's working age population peaked in 1997: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTJPM647S
Basically, if you for whatever reason become/are somewhat disabled, cognitively impaired, lose your family, are simply getting quite old and losing the ability to do what you used to, etc, there will always be some sort of job, often falling under the bloat of what you've listed after "on the other hand", that you'll be able to do if you want to, that will give you a stable income (even if small) and get you out of the house or whatever else and somewhere that you'll have a routine form of socialization amongst your co-workers and such.
Hanko: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)#Japanese_usag...
LOL, that's not even wrong.
1) the companies may be agile, but there is a very big difference between competency in mechanical device/metal working/plastic moulds etc and ramping up electrical / battery / material science / control systems. I see similar challenges in the global 3rd party parts suppliers being valid too. The % of value add of an electric vehicle that the existing infra can support is significantly less than a vehicle with an ICE engine / transmission.
2) Batteries, with the right thermal and charge management systems can last the life of the vehicle itself, with the whole set of components reaching 1 mil km in distance with 1.5 mil km (1 mil miles) in reasonable approach.
3) charging infrastructure can scale with the number of vehicles - other countries have power grids too!
[1] https://www.mitsuba.co.jp/en/
Re: 2 and 3. I'm sure you're correct. But we're talking about salesmanship here. Logic and facts don't always have a buyer. They would need to find ways to sell those used cars to potentially skeptical markets abroad, in huge volume, where they've already got a great racket with ICE cars.
Very few countries have made sustained investment in lots of charging stations, particularly not the ones that Japan normally exports to. According to Wikipedia:
> The most popular destinations for used cars from Japan are Australia, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bolivia, Brunei, Canada, Congo, Dominican Republic, Eswatini, Georgia, Guyana, Hong Kong, Ireland,Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lesotho, Malaysia, Mongolia, Mozambique, Myanmar, New Zealand, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, United Kingdom, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
In the case of some of those countries like Kenya, Uganda, Congo, and Myanmar, not all households are electrified, so you can't reasonably expect them to have national charging grids.
1. Tesla uses Panasonic batteries. Japan already has quite a lot of domestic industry manufacturing those parts and the quality is also top notch.
2. Dunno about batteries, probably with proper management they can last long, but if you maximize performance they'll degrade just like horsepower pumped low capacity engines.
3. Remember Japan had the Fukushima nuclear accident and it has turned off nuclear powerplants and replaced the capacity with coal for almost 10 years. I don't know if the nuclear capacity they have left is even 100% back online.
Easily replaceable batteries is probably a better bet for preserving the retail value of electric cars. Purchases are probably going to be made assuming that the battery pack is worn, and can be replaced with a new battery pack which ideally makes use of more recent battery tech.
Reduced range is far more a "PR problem" than a "real problem". For the most part, people extrapolate from the problems they have with battery life in smartphones, which are constrained by size and thermal management in ways a car isn't, and assuming it is a problem where it isn't one in practice.
Do JAPANESE customers want it enough to pay for it?
If the answer is "no", nothing in existence can change the strategy, design or plans they have. That goes for industrial equipment, customer goods, and certainly for cars.
It doesn't matter who else does the alternative, or who else tries to shame them into something - it won't work. Gaijin opinions count for infinitely less than Nihongo opinions.
Anyone who's not Japanese and has done business with a Japanese business quickly finds this out. If you work for a US subsidiary, you quickly learn NOTHING you suggest will ever be adopted unless major Japanese markets says the same thing or think it's a good idea. And then it will only be implementing with a peculiar Japanese form.
It's just how reality is.
Government policy has a number of levers to pull that determine what customers "want" (see Federal Tax Credit for Electric Cars, or Norway's vehicle tax regime). Governments can also limit the customers choices by declaring no new ICE will sold by the year 20X0, even if the customers want it.
Traditional cars already have all of those things. For a given volume of cars, the quantity you need doesn't increase for an electric car. They're the status quo, not a way to make up for the loss of some other production.
And electric cars don't have cam shafts, exhaust pipes, fuel pumps, transmissions, emissions control systems, alternators, oil pans, spark plugs. That list is so very long too, and all of that is going away and not being replaced with anything.
This would be a good place to mention that even Tesla has long partnered with Panasonic to help with their supply of batteries.
"For a given volume of cars" still holds. If the world is buying more cars, the manufacturer of piston rings is losing the opportunity to expand their business instead of shutting it down, and is inclined to resist.
> What they may lose in cam shaft sales, they may gain in EV part sales anyway.
The whole point is that EVs have significantly fewer parts, and especially fewer moving parts that wear out.
> Battery sales.
The local supplier of bespoke transmission linkages for specific models of Toyota then has to enter into a global commodity market in competition with multi-billion dollar international companies like LG and Tesla and other commodity suppliers in China, South Korea, Germany or Texas.
> This would be a good place to mention that even Tesla has long partnered with Panasonic to help with their supply of batteries.
They did this when they were a tiny upstart with no internal production capacity. They're now constructing their own battery factories on three continents. Anyone converting their whole lineup to electric is likely to do the same because it's the single most expensive part of the car.
Denso (34% of revenue in traditional thermal control, i.e. radiators, water pumps, etc., also famous for spark plugs) will take a hit.
The thousands of much smaller companies that specialise in precisely fabricating minor parts (say, exhaust pipe mounts or engine mounts), less so. The expertise is not so transferable.
There will be change, and everybody hates that.
I imagine Toyota, the largest US car maker and probably globally the largest, is in deep trouble and is in total denial about it. Hitching your future to hydrogen which at it's best is probably about equal to EVs in cost, and which is so far behind practical use as a fuel that by the time (10? 20? years) a generation, transport, and fuelling infrastructure was built out, EVs probably will be 1/2 the cost they are now.
This is absolutely baffling to me, given, as you noted, generation, transport, and fueling issues.
Stevie Wonder would have no problem seeing the problem with hydrogen, and yet Toyota still can't see it?
I'm guessing Nissan, GM, and Tesla have fairly robust patent portfolios related to recent EV tech.
Toyota probably has some stuff to offer related to the electrical side of the hybrid drive, but it's probably a far weaker portfolio-- some of their stuff is near the end of the patent lifecycle, and some is only useful in the context of range extended or hybrid-electric designs.
That means they can't offer a compelling cross-license agreement. It might cost them hundreds or thousands of dollars per vehicle to license the patents at "market rates", particularly of other players see it as a way to hobble a huge competitor.
OTOH, if they can make hydrogen work, they probably hold a lot more cards to deal with other manufacturers.
I'm surprised there wasn't more two-pronged thinking though. The selling point of hydrogen fuel-cell was that it was less subject to range anxiety, but we knew there are clearly identifiable markets where that message was a non-starter. No point selling a 500km range to a city dweller whose longest journey is 25km, but you could sell them a vehicle with Ni-MH batteries left over from 1990s laptops and it would cover their needs.
This would have allowed them to focus on the markets where liquid/gaseous fuel would make its last stands. I'd think freight would be the big one-- even if there's a charging station every 100km along the interstate, business wants to minimize fueling stops, so being able to say "800km+ range-- a full shift of driving on one tank of hydrogen" would set the bar high for electric competition.
three major reasons for this, fairly separate from car-electrification.
1) mandatory (paid, around 900usd) motor-vehicle inspections at 3 years
2) cost of mechanical maintenance in Japan (few car shops, huge prices)
3) no tax reduction on older/vintage/used/low-cost vehicles (like the US value-based registration costs)
I don't disagree that the auto industry of Japan is likely also protecting their own interests -- but driving in Japan has always been a pretty big personal burden on people; I see no reason why electric cars are going to get a pass from the three things I listed, they require maintenance, have a high value, and fail inspections, too.
unless laws change those failed inspection cars are either getting exported , fixed, or destroyed. there is still an export element available there.
The drive train is enormously different. And that's the part that breaks the most.
Here are a few differences, off the top of my head (I'm not an auto engineer):
Much simpler cooling. Extracting heat from batteries is easier than from an IC engine.
No need for high temperature moving parts like pistons and valves. No need for oil under high pressure to cool and lubricate those parts. No need for a turbocharger, spinning at 100,000 plus RPM.
No need for a complicated system of storing and delivering gasoline (tanks, pumps, injectors).
No need for pollution mitigation such as EGR and Urea injection.
No need for expensive catalytic converters. Around here, those are routinely stolen for the metals, in daylight, right off parked cars.
No need for a transmission. Except for exotics such as a Porsche Taycan.
No need for a transfer case. If there's a motor for each wheel then there's not even a need for a differential.
I think the totality of differences in the drive train is profound. The change isn't minor. To riff on something that Jules Winnfield said: ain't the same fuckin' ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same fuckin' sport
By contrast, under normal operating conditions, most of the wear parts of the engine and driveline are running in a sealed environment, bathed in the appropriate lubricant, and, in the case of the engine, actively cooled to maintain optional running conditions.
Al the parts that make up an ICE are incredibly mature technology. The engineering work to get the tolerances and everything else worked out that has been done over the last hundred years is unreal. And it's happened in concert with work by chemists in the lubrication industry, and every other ancillary industry. The level of reliability under normal use with regular maintenance defies belief. Like, when was the last time you gave your spark plugs even a moment's thought? The progress in metallurgy, fueling and ignition systems has made them an all but lifetime part on modern cars.
I would actually wager that for most people, the least reliable and most aggravating part of their car is now the infotainment system.
I carry a portable jumpstarter because you just dont know when your car will refuse to turn on.
At this point long-term real-world data is available for Tesla Model S, and it loses about 4-5% per 100,000 miles.
Will electric motors be more reliable than internal combustion engines? Probably. But it's a difference that's not going to be noticable by most people.
Tesla Model 3 apparently has a 6 year service interval.
Electric cars are still greatly more efficient on energy usage compared to gasoline cars. You'd have to grossly overcharge for electricity to make the comparison anywhere close.
Use this calculator to see the difference in fuel vs. electric costs:
Gas cost per mile at 30mpg @ $3.00/gal is $0.10.
In most cases, yes, it's going to save money. You'd need a high MPG car in an expensive electricity state that has somewhat cheap gas to really flip that.
Also you lucked out with a particularly reliable model. I can guarantee you there are plenty of 20-year-old cars that are riddled with engine and tranny problems.
Surprised me given their reputation. I will not be buying any more of them.
How many miles do you have on your focus? My edge started degrading fast after about 100,000 miles.
Almost never. EV motors and their gears don't have the problem of injected pollutants in the oil. This is why most are expected to last a million miles or more.
The lack of a transmission also eliminates a major point of failure (gear shifting)
> But batteries have thousands of parts and electrical connections.
Those aren't mechanical parts, that's the big difference. When people talk about EVs having fewer parts, they are referring to the moving parts. The parts that most commonly fail in ICE.
Define "many" and give a citation.
Tesla warranty for the drive unit is 8 years/120,000 miles. I doubt they'd set it that high if the expectation was that these drive units are going to fail all over the place.
Compare that to both ford and toyota which have a 5 years/60,000 miles powertrain warranty
> And batteries do also fail
They can due to manufacturing faults. However, both batteries and engines follow more of a washtub curve.
> Not sure why you would say otherwise.
You are overstating the failures of both.
But they are not cheaper, yet. Vehicles available in both IC and electric consistently cost much more for the electric model. The base model Chevy Spark is $13,600. The base model Chevy Bolt (which GM says is the successor to the electric version of the Spark) is $36,500. The base model Ford F-150 is $29,290. The base model electric Ford F-150 is about $40,000.
2022 is going to be interesting for electric vehicles. That's the year electric trucks, from Ford to Freightliner to Volvo, ship in volume. Possibly Tesla, too. Suddenly, electric vehicles will be very mainstream, doing routine jobs.
I think electric vehicles are mainstream there, already. It wouldn’t surprise me if all further winning bids were fully electric.
For example, googling “public transport bus tenders electric” gives me
- https://www.sustainable-bus.com/news/de-lijn-tender-350-elec... (Belgium, 350 buses)
- https://www.sustainable-bus.com/news/tm-barcelona-tender-ele... (Barcelona, 210 buses)
- https://www.electrive.com/2020/11/23/amsterdams-gvb-to-procu... (Amsterdam, 142 buses)
Meanwhile Ford is definitely playing catch up and the Electric F-150 seems like it's charging for all of the above ("luxury base package", R&D costs from too many years in the hydrogen wilderness, "new and innovative" model retooling costs, etc). (Ford's an interesting dark horse in the 2022/2023 statements crowd. I think they are hedging too many bets right now, and playing way to conservatively. Current estimates are that if they got their head in the game and cut the Electric F-150 base price in half they'd dominate the US market very quickly, and there's some sentiment that if they weren't playing dumb amortization games with themselves and very easily created a less luxury package base model they are possibly in a position to do exactly that. Based on current estimates of true marginal costs.)
The part that I find most interesting is that Chinese manufacturers with no ICE legacy are building cheaper cars than everyone else right now and it is amazing to watch. There are sub-$1000 cars on Alibaba today! Those sub-$1000 cars might not be strongly interesting to US market preferences right now (where "big" and "truck-like" dominate perhaps way too much), but if it is an early warning sign that the margin wars in EVs are about to get started then it is a really exciting and encouraging one.
It's true there's a huge industry for white label car parts manufacturing in Japan. These companies are extremely agile. They will adapt. Taking contracts for novel new parts is their daily DNA. They already work extensively with foreign car companies, so they're not anchored to the foibles of Toyota and Nissan.
Furthermore, electric cars still need complex parts! Sensors of all types, electric windows and door locks, key fobs, air conditioners, steering wheels, windshield wiper motors, etc. The list is so very long.
I have one wild guess as counterpoint. Today's Japan would never mandate a shift to all-electric vehicles. Why? It would destroy their domestic car sales industry. In Japan, many people only keep their cars for a few years, then sell them back. Used Japanese domestic cars are worth a lot of money. These cars are exported to other countries around the world, where they're resold. I imagine Japan could no longer resell their domestic cars abroad, at such huge volume, if all their cars were electric. Many countries do not have the conditions or infrastructure to support large-scale deployment of EVs. Batteries would probably need to be replaced, lowering the profit on the resale. And so on.