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Comment by clomond | Hacker News Reader

Just a few points to consider here.

1) the companies may be agile, but there is a very big difference between competency in mechanical device/metal working/plastic moulds etc and ramping up electrical / battery / material science / control systems. I see similar challenges in the global 3rd party parts suppliers being valid too. The % of value add of an electric vehicle that the existing infra can support is significantly less than a vehicle with an ICE engine / transmission.

2) Batteries, with the right thermal and charge management systems can last the life of the vehicle itself, with the whole set of components reaching 1 mil km in distance with 1.5 mil km (1 mil miles) in reasonable approach.

3) charging infrastructure can scale with the number of vehicles - other countries have power grids too!

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Re: 1. I can only speak to the company I saw up close, Mitsuba [1]. They are already very sophisticated on all fronts you've described: mechanical, electrical, material. Even software. If I had to guess, they're licking their lips at the kinds of higher margin products that electric cars might represent for their business. And they're not alone in their capabilities among Japanese parts suppliers.

[1] https://www.mitsuba.co.jp/en/

Re: 2 and 3. I'm sure you're correct. But we're talking about salesmanship here. Logic and facts don't always have a buyer. They would need to find ways to sell those used cars to potentially skeptical markets abroad, in huge volume, where they've already got a great racket with ICE cars.

> charging infrastructure can scale with the number of vehicles - other countries have power grids too!

Very few countries have made sustained investment in lots of charging stations, particularly not the ones that Japan normally exports to. According to Wikipedia:

> The most popular destinations for used cars from Japan are Australia, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bolivia, Brunei, Canada, Congo, Dominican Republic, Eswatini, Georgia, Guyana, Hong Kong, Ireland,Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lesotho, Malaysia, Mongolia, Mozambique, Myanmar, New Zealand, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, United Kingdom, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

In the case of some of those countries like Kenya, Uganda, Congo, and Myanmar, not all households are electrified, so you can't reasonably expect them to have national charging grids.

> very big difference between competency in mechanical device/metal working/plastic moulds etc and ramping up electrical / battery / material science / control systems

1. Tesla uses Panasonic batteries. Japan already has quite a lot of domestic industry manufacturing those parts and the quality is also top notch.

2. Dunno about batteries, probably with proper management they can last long, but if you maximize performance they'll degrade just like horsepower pumped low capacity engines.

3. Remember Japan had the Fukushima nuclear accident and it has turned off nuclear powerplants and replaced the capacity with coal for almost 10 years. I don't know if the nuclear capacity they have left is even 100% back online.

Shallower discharge means reduced range. Or more batteries, but that increases mass of the vehicle which in turn increases energy consumption. Customers are going to see a car with substantially less range, or a much more expensive car with less usable space and heavier weight. And it might not even be able to reach the advertised mileage if the customer is in a hot climate.

Easily replaceable batteries is probably a better bet for preserving the retail value of electric cars. Purchases are probably going to be made assuming that the battery pack is worn, and can be replaced with a new battery pack which ideally makes use of more recent battery tech.

In practice, reduced range hasn't been a problem in the Used Car market to date. Outside of some well known issues with especially early model Nissan Leafs, the majority of EVs that have entered the used market have not seen dramatic reductions in range in their expected lifetimes. (If anything the used market is seeing the opposite problem: batteries are generally exceeding their expected lifetimes and in part because of that EVs are staying in the hands of first owners for far longer than comparable ICE models.)

Reduced range is far more a "PR problem" than a "real problem". For the most part, people extrapolate from the problems they have with battery life in smartphones, which are constrained by size and thermal management in ways a car isn't, and assuming it is a problem where it isn't one in practice.

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