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Comment by serjester | Hacker News Reader

Honda is a very Japanese company internally - they have their 30 year vision (all electric fleet) and they take slow incremental steps to achieve it.

The reality is they’re a fairly small automaker and 99% of their current sales are IC cars. They believe they will do more for the environment to keep spending a large portion of their R&D budget getting gains out of their existing cars than completely pivoting to something people aren’t currently buying. In the meantime, a lot of the fundamental issues with EV cars will iron themselves out.

Westerners want results tomorrows but the Japanese will take incremental steps that maximize the chance of success over an incredibly long time horizon. Very different mindsets.

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Toyota seems to be in no hurry to make full EVs.

Trouble is that all automakers selling in North America seem to have no interest in making EVs that ordinary people can afford, it is all about luxury and behemoth vehicles.

When Chinese manufacturers reach our shores I think domestic, Euro and Japanese carmakers will get an unpleasant surprise.

Given what we already see playing out in Europe and America's existing history of trade policy with China, I suspect politics/trade policy will likely be very unkind to allowing imports of cheap chinese cars to the US any time soon.

European and Japanese manufacturers are already getting that nasty surprise in European markets competing with Chinese EVs like the MG4 etc.

>> European markets competing with Chinese EVs like the MG4 etc. <<

I suspect that most Europeans buyers have no idea that MG is now owned by a Chinese company. No native Chinese brand sell above 1% in the EU.

MG is a Chinese native brand in my eyes and a lot of European consumers - it's widely known it's a Chinese product even if consumers don't know of SAIC. This isn't like they bought 51% of some European car company and kept the same management, workers and factories; none of the cars are made in Europe, they are largely made in China and sold around the world with the logo of a failed UK car manufacturer SAIC acquired decades ago etc.

Certainly very few customers think they are buying a British product! It also hasn't prevented the MG4 from picking up a lot of critical acclaim/car of the year awards in Europe too, and virtually every review of the car mentions its Chinese origin, usually in the context of it offering more EV for less money in several regards than a European ID3 etc.

Sure, then what do you think explains such a high disparity between MG's and local Chinese brand's EV sales in EU? The best selling Chinese EV brand, BYD, has 0.6% of regional market share.

That's clearly because making and selling EVs don't make a ton of financial sense. EVs that do are ridiculed and criticized to death. It was almost solely because of Tesla selling vehicles at loss for literally a decade that EVs became recognized as wastefully expensive but viable option.

EVs that do or almost do make sense without strong subsidization by investments, such as Nissan Leaf, Toyota bZ4X, Honda e[1] are still ignored and/or trivialized for disappointing product value propositions.

1: Why is the e sometimes considered a compliance car? There's no gas variant or shared platform or body panel, it's all-custom all-new ... garbage. But not a factory engine swap like MX-30 EV or e-Golf.

> Westerners want results tomorrows but the Japanese will take incremental steps that maximize the chance of success over an incredibly long time horizon. Very different mindsets.

This may be true, but unfortunately the timeline we have created for ourselves with regards to climate change is unyielding. The scale of the problem is that we need to take as many IC cars off the road as fast as possible and put as many electric cars on the road as possible if we want to avoid disastrous climate scenarios.

This rings true for Mazda as well, which has eventual plans but nothing immediate. I'm sure once they have their EVs, they will uphold to the same reliability as their ICs.

I’m not all that well versed in this topic, but I’d be more likely to credit Japanese Industrial Policy than Japanese Mindset.

It really seems like Japan went all in on fuel cell technology.

Honda isn't even doing incremental steps, they are sitting it out still hoping EVs fail. That was a "safe" bet 10 years ago but completely insane now. Car companies just can't pivot on a dime, you have to ramp up your supply chain over a few years which the the Japanese OEMs are NOT doing.

In the early 2000s Toyota and Honda did hybrids right while the US OEMs sat out the first 10 year. Japan OEMS are doing that failed US OEM stragegy now for EVs... and they'll unfortunately pay for it.

This really isn't a fair characterization.

https://hondanews.com/en-US/releases/honda-announces-next-st...

Are you kidding me? Those are modest investments for how far behind they are and it is nothing compared to every other OEM's EV (re)investment.

That one joint venture battery plant for instance will at some point do 40GWH output a year while Tesla's Reno plan does 100 GWH a year -- right now.

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