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Once were leaders: Japanese electric car market finally stirs after more than a decade of slumber

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Once were leaders: Japanese electric car market finally stirs after more than a decade of slumber

In 2010/11, it seemed the market leader mantle for making battery electric cars was going to be a tussle between established Japanese manufacturers and the US upstart Tesla.

Japan appeared to have the early lead, as Nissan and Mitsubishi were the first to get mass-production BEVs to market, Mitsubishi in 2010 with the BEV converted i-MiEV and Nissan in 2011 with the first ever ground-up design BEV, the Leaf.

But the reality is that Tesla stole the march in 2008 with their converted Lotus Elise (the Roadster – of which only around 2,450 were sold), even though it wasn’t till 2012 that Tesla brought their first production model, the Model S, to market.

From there, Tesla kicked-on and Mitsubishi didn’t do much beyond a van version using the iMiEV drivetrain. (And only now are Mitsubishi about to bring out a new BEV passenger car). Nissan limped on with gentle updates of the Leaf (plus a van version called the e-NV200) until the Renault-Nissan shared-platform Ariya arrived in 2023.

The other Japanese makers (Toyota, Mazda, Honda, Suzuki, Subaru) have all been late to the BEV party and are losing market share everywhere in the world as ICE powertrain sales fall. Elsewhere, whilst the European manufacturers iterated slowly, BEV sales there have skyrocketed with the new Chinese BEV manufacturers becoming the beneficiary.

Even 10, 15 years ago people (including me) were writing about how China was stealthily (and single-mindedly) using their local market to develop BEV technology and manufacturing in order to hit the world running in terms of mass-produced quality, reliable and cheap BEVs.


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