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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm very surprised by Japan not being a big battery manufacturer already. Sure they do a lot business in battery materials, but so far none of Japanese battery makers seriously entered the automotive battery market on a scale of Chinese factories.

By my calculations, the horsepower limit, speed limit, emission penalties, and general size, and crash-worthiness requirements already make a 10-15kWh battery pack powered K car surely cheaper than an IC one.

And on top of that. Japanese who have cars drive really, really little, even by standards of similar countries with a lot of big cities close together. (South Korea being the biggest antipod, they really drive around a lot)

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The Tesla gigafactory in Nevada is mostly run by Panasonic. I expect that there is little domestic production there because Toyota & Honda haven't fully embraced EVs yet.

https://na.panasonic.com/us/whatmovesus/gigafactory

> And on top of that. Japanese who have cars drive really, really little, even by standards of similar countries with a lot of big cities close together. (South Korea being the biggest antipod, they really drive around a lot)

That’s a pretty big assumption. By the time you get to Nagoya (3rd-4th largest city), commuting by car is common and families will have 2-3 vehicles.

Do the dynamics of Tokyo drivers (car exists for driving to the countryside) make sense for a small-range electric vehicle? Like there aren’t that many EV parking spots in the outlet stores 2.5 hours away

Seems like electric makes more sense in places where people are more likely to use their cars for daily commutes

Japanese daily commute is like 10km for a roundtrip, even for rural areas. A 10kWh battery will last days in such usage regimen.

My point was more about people living in large cities just using public transportation instead for their daily commutes. Perhaps I’m totally wrong on the relative scale of that

It’s not that all car sales happen in Tokyo (far from it) and there’s a lot of Tesla’s etc, but why buy a car that you would only be able to use for a daily commute and not for trips that go much further than that?

10kwh according to Google gets you like 80km. That’s pretty minuscule and would preclude even short weekend trips.

I knew one Japanese guy with two cars. One Kei, for driving the hood, and daily commute. And one proper, large car for "showing off" in the big city. He said such was rather common.

The fancier is the car, the less people drive it so they can sell it at higher value.

I think part of the reason that people will have one Kei (or 5 number) car and one 3 number car is that there are a lot of narrow streets, tight corners, and parking spaces that 3 number cars will barely manage that are much easier to navigate with a smaller vehicle.

An electric k car (i-MiEV) was the one of the first mainstream electric vehicles, made in 2009, but since then charging infrastructure has not been growing at a very fast rate and is quite a way behind smaller European countries. There are several companies announcing electric k cars for release in the next couple of years but they are much more expensive than petrol and I think it will be decades before they are widespread.

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