As markets from China to the United States race to put more EVs on their roads, the pedal is nowhere near the metal yet in Japan, where the hybrid still reigns supreme.
TOKYO - Atsushi Ikeda loves his car so much that he founded a club for Tesla owners, but his embrace of an electric vehicle makes him something of an outlier in Japan.
The scepticism is no secret, and the former chief of Toyota, the world's top-selling carmaker, regularly questioned the growing focus on electric. "I like high-performance cars," he told AFP, describing the few Japanese options on the market when he bought in 2016 as small and unattractive. At the time though, the models were expensive because of their batteries and considered impractical given the lack of a nationwide charging network.
If they cannot "react quickly" to these new demands, "some Japanese carmakers could disappear", said auto analyst Koji Endo, of SBI Securities.Japanese firms have begun rolling out more ambitious EV targets, even as foreign automakers try to establish a foothold for their EVs in the country.
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