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

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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.

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