Japan automakers play catch-up in EV race

Funny thing is, Chinese EVs are at the place where Japanese cars were back in the 1970s. Widely mocked as cheap crap, but consumers like them well enough, and the quality keeps improving. The US reacts by shutting them out of its market, but they're doing awfully well everywhere else in the world...

Until they (every one of them) catch-up with price to ICE it's gonna be tough. Same story with every single automotive brand we had in past decades. They thought they're invincible, until...

All the people vehemently defending ICE in this thread are missing the point.

All the expensive maintenance/problems with my current ICE are with things that do NOT exist on a BEV:

• head gasket
• timing belt
• catalytic converter
• oil change

Also, the scumbag dealer straight up LIED because I specifically asked about the common head gasket issues with Subaru and they assured me that they had been fixed, and then proceeded to sell me a car with the exact engine which had that issue even though the same model year had started shipping with a new engine that didn't have the problem.

So I do NOT give a SINGLE fuck about the environmental tradeoffs between lithium extraction and all the dirty fluids involved with a ICE. If you have a hard-on for breathing smog, I won't kink-shame you.

In summary, I'll be getting a BEV because:

1. It won't ever blow a head gasket and spew coolant and oil all over itself for no fucking reason while I'm just trying to get home from work. The battery will slowly degrade over many years, but that's very predictable and can be planned for.
2. It won't ever force me to replace it because it needs a catalytic converter that costs more than the car is worth and can't pass emissions. Again, I won't kink shame you if you get off on breathing smog, but I also don't believe you have the right to force that on everyone else with your bypass kits and rolling coal BS.
3. I will NOT have to deal with lying scumbag car dealers. These middlemen add NO value to the transaction and they lobby to force the state governments to keep them involved.
4. I'll never have to go with a gas station and deal with their bullshit gas pumps with poor usability, I can charge at night and while I WFH
5. My car will be able to run on any fuel that can generate electricity: natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, etc. ICE cars are dependent on a very specific nasty byproduct of petroleum refinement which is constantly price gouged for windfall profits by greedy corporations and our government just lets it happened because they are bought and paid for by the same industry, they'll even send subsidies their way as an extra fuck-you to the taxpayer. I'll stick with my local, municipal electric company which is held accountable to provide me electricity without padding the windfall profits of the 1%.
6. An electric motor is a much better engineering solution to the problem of creating forward momentum than an ICE. There are some things that you need to burn a liquid fuel for, like if you're going to try to launch a rocket. Turning a wheel is NOT one of them. Do the ICE fetishers even know how an ICE works? It's immensely over-complicated to create an explosion and then harness the power of that explosion to create rotation, which is trivial to achieve with electricity. So many moving parts which all have to be properly lubricated and aligned or it will literally explode and spew metal and toxic chemicals everwhere. No thanks. Kids can make electric motors in science class.

All that being said, I'm still not going to drop 3x the cost on a BEV over an ICE, the prices DO need to come down. Thankfully, with lots of options in the market it looks like they will.

I thought the nationality was called "Japanese", so "Japanese automakers"?

BEVs are a dead end. It's an idea older than internal combustion and is already obsolete. The world needs to shift focus to concepts like e-fuels or hydrogen cars.