What secret they understand that rest of us don't ? Is it cyclic efficiency ? Residual discharge loss ? Environmental cleanup cost ? Lithium sourcing ? Chance of future tech progress ? Charging time ? What ?
They spent decades researching hydrogen fuel cells and finally brought a car to market with the technology. Their Mirai is essentially a fuel-cell hybrid, where the ICE component has been replaced with a fuel-cell equivalent and the only waste product from the hydrogen fuel is water. All told it is actually pretty cool, and it is nice to see an alternative to pure electric battery-driven drive trains. Ripping up the crust for Lithium isn’t much of an improvement over ripping it up for hydrocarbons, but it might be a century before we collectively agree.
“Mirai” by the way, means “future” in Japanese.
If everyone converted entirely to lithium-ion batteries, the crust would still be ripped up about one millionth as much it is at present for fossil fuels.