The Japanese electric grid is even worse than the one in the US.

Their grid is a mix of 60Hz and 50Hz networks because of weird historical reasons. It's also single-phase, which isn't the best for mass EV charging.

Compare that to, say, Finland where every single apartment and house has three-phase power. 3x16A or 3x32A usually. It's completely trivial to install a 11kW home charger for example, it's just running some cables and maybe adding a load balancer - all 100yo tech.

Most Japanese houses do not have parking garages or private parking spaces, so the ability to charge from home is irrelevant.

But in any case, single phase is fine for home charging and it's the default in many parts of the world. Three phase charging is a nice luxury, but far from a necessity.

In many Japanese cities you won't get a permit to buy a car unless you can prove you have a place to park it. Curbside parking isn't a thing.

So in those cases it really is irrelevant whether you can charge or not =)

Indeed. And it's not so difficult to make a rule that wherever car parks and parking spaces are built, chargers must also be provided.

BEV is hit and miss for Japan. For vehicle usage, it's great that we don't need to import oil from mideast (that is a big reason for trade deficit) and of course it's great for commute and non-long commercial usage. But it's not suitable for a big personal car use case. Japanese family can't take holidays as what they want, so they tend to do long trip in the same specific long holidays (new year, Golden week, Obon, Silver week), that needs tremendous amount of fast charging equipment at highway. So theoretically PHEV should be good option but manufacturers hadn't sold it much (except Mitsubishi). It's hard to install slow charger for mechanical parking system that is common in dense cities.

For vehicle manufacturing, there's very less advantage to make BEVs in Japan, meanwhile China is too strong. Car manufacturing is a big industry so shrinking it causes Japan economy to be dead. Toyota cares Japan economy (cared in a bad way, hydrogen for car). IMO they should had promoted PHEV more in 2012-2015.

The "holiday weekend" phenomena is not unique to Japan. It's a challenge already for many countries with growing EV share, where you often see big queues at charging stations along highways at peak holiday times.

It's not insurmountable, though. For one thing, big industries tend to shut down on holiday weekends, so there is lots of spare generation & transmission capacity on the grid. Here in the UK it's not unusual for wholesale electricity prices to go negative on windy holiday weekends - there's so much surplus energy available that the grid struggles to deal with it all! That's very profitable for charging operators and a strong incentive to deploy as much fast charging as possible.

Dynamic pricing can also help here. You raise prices at the most congested charging times and locations, and lower them at under-utilised locations and off-peak times. Tesla already do this with their superchargers. Navigation software that is aware of how busy the chargers are can also route traffic onto less congested routes where there is unlikely to be queues.

Also remember that there is plenty of time to build out all the needed charging infrastructure. Even if all car sales switched to EV tomorrow, we've still got 10-20 years before we approach 100% of journeys being made by EV, depending on how fast the vehicle fleet gets turned over in your country.

> "For vehicle manufacturing, there's very less advantage to make BEVs in Japan, meanwhile China is too strong. Car manufacturing is a big industry so shrinking it causes Japan economy to be dead. "

Japan must make BEVs in Japan in order to secure the future of the Japanese car industry. If they don't keep up with the times, there won't be a Japanese car industry in the long term - at least not for exports. Japan putting their heads in the sand will not make the global EV transition disappear!