lancpudn:
The Japanese car manufacturers have shown a lot of resistance for the transition to electric cars apart from Nissan & to a degree Toyota but both ran out of steam early on after the Nissan Gen 1 Leaf, Mitsubishi PHEV Outlander & the Toyota hybrid Prius started to lose ground against other BEV manufacturers, Subaru, Mazda have been nowhere to be seen until recently with joint ventures to pool resources. They are really worried at losing ICE manufacture because there’s a perfect storm brewing in Japan! The Japanese population is aged & they have hundreds of thousands employed in the car industry there, If they stopped making ICE vehicles the majority of the workers employed by the car industry would be made redundant as they don’t need that vast number of workers for electric vehicles.
There wouldn’t be enough workers paying into the pension pot to pay for the aged population at present. Some of them have left it way to late to get a lithium battery supply sorted out let alone the chip shortage problem that’s going to last at least another year. I dare say this is going to happen to every country that manufactures ICE vehicles.
EV makes no sense v Hydrogen ICE.
It’s just creating dependence on rarer more expensive lithium to add to dependence on nuclear with the lose lose of inferior technology.
It’s more likely to be the issue of nuclear v fossil fuel which is the deal breaker for Japan for deep seated reasons and the Fukushima disaster being the final straw.
With hydrogen fuelled ICE they can obviously at least make the extra nuclear generation issue to produce it, someone else’s problem and remove dependence on Lithium and give themselves a commercial advantage by wrong footing the EV manufacturers who’ve hopefully bet on the wrong horse.
EV’s lost the battle v ICE over 100 years ago and it’s not over yet.
Hydrogen fuelled ICE is the better alternative than Lithium.Bearing in mind that 2030/5 doesn’t actually ban hydrogen fuelled ICE.So Tesla etc and Shell and Octopus v the Japanese car industry hopefully allied with BP.Game on my guess is that BMW and Merc at least will go with the Japs rather than fight Tesla on its own turf.
As for consumer market forces it’s a no brainer with the new/near new car market crash already proving it.
Especially at the high end which needs and sells on the basis of multi cylinder ICE bragging rights for the cash.
While even mid range still has similar issues of customer resistance.The customer who buys a 6 or 8 cylinder ICE isn’t going to be impressed by any EV on offer in that price sector.Don’t under estimate just how much economic damage this is all already causing to the automotive industry.
youtube.com/watch?v=CxwJH7MYdAU
As for commercials the payload v battery weight issue also won’t help the EV side.
Although it’s ironic that either way they’ll replace the lesser, more like if any, green house CO2, with the proper greenhouse water vapour both from power stations and/or hydrogen exhausts.