Japan automakers play catch-up in EV race
Japan automakers play catch-up in EV race
Japan's once unassailable car manufacturers have been caught napping by EV makers in the US and China, but now they're fighting back.
Funny thing is, Chinese EVs are at the place where Japanese cars were back in the 1970s. Widely mocked as cheap crap, but consumers like them well enough, and the quality keeps improving. The US reacts by shutting them out of its market, but they're doing awfully well everywhere else in the world...
Partially because the Chinese government is good at covering up any negative news about them.
Japan changed the manufacturing game.
10 years later people are taking business trips to Japan to learn how to do it.
I learnt about Japanese manufacturing in the last 10 years and started a career in it.
Toyota rather falling out of favour in recent years of course
Hyundai/Kia tho …. We can’t lock out the Koreans and someone’s lunch is getting eaten
Even outside the US I would not want to buy a Chinese electric car. Can you imagine trying to get maintenance on that thing.
I'm starting to see proper dealerships from brands like BYD so it's not so far off. I don't know the details but if they're implemented physically in the region then I assume they provide maintenance.
Until they (every one of them) catch-up with price to ICE it's gonna be tough. Same story with every single automotive brand we had in past decades. They thought they're invincible, until...
Exactly.
And when parts become available at my local auto parts store. One of my friends had a Model 3 and it took 1 MONTH to replace a broken passenger door mirror. It also took 3 WEEKS to fix a power seat issue. The same car had multiple growing pain issues that took way too much time to fix.
They were thrilled to trade it in on a new Camry so they could have a functioning car again.
This is just the state of the auto industry at the moment. There's just as many teslas and evs waiting on parts as there are traditional ICE models when adjusted for market scale. The days of having everything in stock at the dealer for a quick swap are dead and gone.
Was this in the last 4 years? Because supply chains and labor are still in recovery everywhere.
All the people vehemently defending ICE in this thread are missing the point.
All the expensive maintenance/problems with my current ICE are with things that do NOT exist on a BEV:
- head gasket
- timing belt
- catalytic converter
- oil change
Also, the scumbag dealer straight up LIED because I specifically asked about the common head gasket issues with Subaru and they assured me that they had been fixed, and then proceeded to sell me a car with the exact engine which had that issue even though the same model year had started shipping with a new engine that didn't have the problem.
So I do NOT give a SINGLE fuck about the environmental tradeoffs between lithium extraction and all the dirty fluids involved with a ICE. If you have a hard-on for breathing smog, I won't kink-shame you.
In summary, I'll be getting a BEV because:
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It won't ever blow a head gasket and spew coolant and oil all over itself for no fucking reason while I'm just trying to get home from work. The battery will slowly degrade over many years, but that's very predictable and can be planned for.
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It won't ever force me to replace it because it needs a catalytic converter that costs more than the car is worth and can't pass emissions. Again, I won't kink shame you if you get off on breathing smog, but I also don't believe you have the right to force that on everyone else with your bypass kits and rolling coal BS.
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I will NOT have to deal with lying scumbag car dealers. These middlemen add NO value to the transaction and they lobby to force the state governments to keep them involved.
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I'll never have to go with a gas station and deal with their bullshit gas pumps with poor usability, I can charge at night and while I WFH
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My car will be able to run on any fuel that can generate electricity: natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, etc. ICE cars are dependent on a very specific nasty byproduct of petroleum refinement which is constantly price gouged for windfall profits by greedy corporations and our government just lets it happened because they are bought and paid for by the same industry, they'll even send subsidies their way as an extra fuck-you to the taxpayer. I'll stick with my local, municipal electric company which is held accountable to provide me electricity without padding the windfall profits of the 1%.
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An electric motor is a much better engineering solution to the problem of creating forward momentum than an ICE. There are some things that you need to burn a liquid fuel for, like if you're going to try to launch a rocket. Turning a wheel is NOT one of them. Do the ICE fetishers even know how an ICE works? It's immensely over-complicated to create an explosion and then harness the power of that explosion to create rotation, which is trivial to achieve with electricity. So many moving parts which all have to be properly lubricated and aligned or it will literally explode and spew metal and toxic chemicals everwhere. No thanks. Kids can make electric motors in science class.
All that being said, I'm still not going to drop 3x the cost on a BEV over an ICE, the prices DO need to come down. Thankfully, with lots of options in the market it looks like they will.
Which is where fuel cell cars come in. They are also EVs. It pretty much renders the BEV obsolete. A lot of BEV advocacy are from people stuck in the early 2000s, totally unaware that technology has past them by. It is similar to the past obsession with diesel cars, which at one point was see as unbeatable.
Aren't there still immense challenges with the safe storage and transportation of hydrogen? Will I be able to generate that hydrogen from my own solar panels?
I'm actually in agreement that FCEVs are the future, I just haven't seen anything to convince me that those challenges have been addressed. Didn't Toyota screw up by betting heavily on FCEVs instead of BEVs and now they have to play catch-up?
I thought the nationality was called "Japanese", so "Japanese automakers"?
Or Japan's Automakers.
Headlines in general just seemed to be terrible. It's like when they decide the word "and" is too hard to type so they just use a comma instead, but also still use commas sometimes for their original purpose. Leading to some very weird sentences.
Father, daughter win lottery, separately
That's a genuine headline I've seen in a local paper.
lol yeah, it does sometimes seem like headlines will compromise grammar in favor of brevity to the point of incomprehensibility...
BEVs are a dead end. It's an idea older than internal combustion and is already obsolete. The world needs to shift focus to concepts like e-fuels or hydrogen cars.
Or just move to building proper public transport like Europe did.
Europe is a huge continent. What do you mean, exactly?
The UK is in Europe, and in many cities here the public transport options are terrible, with driving being the only safe option, as cycling is very dangerous on our roads.
There are also huge parts of France, Italy, and Germany where public transport is poor, expensive, or infrequent.
I can charge my EV in the garage and not have to stand at a gas station in -30. Why on Earth would I want a less convenient hydrogen or other fuel car?
Because not everyone has a garage, and you still have to use the equivalent of gas stations if you're travelling long distances.
In reality, BEVs pre-date ICE cars. They were abandoned because they were found to be less practical. The vast majority of people actually want gas stations and not the reverse.
I'm going to say that if you can charge at home, then electric cars are awesome, otherwise a HFC style car might be better.
Both are going to require significant infrastructure build out, but electric chargers are much easier to install.
