Japan and China have massively different views on EVs. I think my money is now on Japan | Opinion

It’s not a question that gets raised a lot in high-school history classes, but perhaps it should, and it’s certainly one I ponder whenever I visit The Only Country in the World Where Everything Just Works – would the world be a better place if Japan had won World War II?

What seems quite likely is that we wouldn’t be driving electric vehicles, which account for just two per cent of new car sales in Japan.

That’s partly because the Japanese don’t seem to believe in them as the answer to combating climate change, or anything else – and partly because they would have come with a better solution.

READ MORE: EV fightback! Can the 2026 Honda-Nissan-Mitsubishi merger finally get Japan competitive against Tesla and the Chinese?
READ MORE: You can forget a cheap Japanese electric car in Australia: Red-tape ends Mitsubishi’s dream of sub-$30K eK SUV
READ MORE: Electric HiLux incoming! New Toyota HiLux REVO heads for production in Thailand as Japanese giant beats Ford Ranger to BEV workhorse

Yes, I know it’s controversial and that Japanese is a difficult language for us all to be speaking  (it’s also the fastest in the world, in terms of syllables per second, probably because they don’t want to waste time), but I’m currently visiting, along with several billion other tourists, and it’s hard to argue that we wouldn’t all be better off, overall, if they were in charge.

Our toilet seats would be warm, our bottoms washed, the food would be immeasurably better (honestly, I saw an Aussie bar – the Coolabah – in Okinawa and was overcome with shame at its offerings of meat pies and sausage rolls), the trains would run on time (over an entire year, including natural disasters, the Shinkanzens, or Bullet Trains, averaged a lateness of 12 seconds in the 1990s, it’s now up to 1 minute 20 seconds, but that’s across a whole year), football fans would clean the stadium before they leave, crime would be near zero and you’d be able to buy beer for $2 while sitting in an owl cafe.

I find it slightly disconcerting that the Japanese have decided EVs are not the answer – sales cratered by a whopping 33 per cent in 2024 alone – because they tend to be so damn right about everything else (except for killing yourself out of shame when you lose a fight, that idea stinks).

But I think I’ve got my head around at least part of their thinking. I spent a few days in Tokyo with a view out my window of the impressive Sky Tree (the world’s tallest tower, until the Burj topped it), so quite central, and I would often look out and wonder at the fact that the two local streets I could see had no traffic on them at all.

One evening, because I live for danger, I went on a go-karting tour of the city, including the world’s busiest intersection at Shibuya (three million people cross it each year, or up to 3000 every time the lights change) and was warned that, as it was peak hour, we might be delayed by traffic.

And yet, in Sydney or Melbourne terms, there was hardly any delay at all. Everything just moved. The world’s biggest city by population has less congestion than Perth or Brisbane.

The answer, of course, is having fewer cars on the road. This is partly achieved by living like ants – with so little space you have to prove you can park a car before you’re allowed to buy one.

But more impressively, and logically, by having public transport systems that are so damn good you’d actually want to use them.

Because I can’t help myself, even on holiday, I also took note of just how few of the cars around us were electric – in 10 days here I have seen fewer than a handful of Teslas – particularly when I was on the go-kart, which meant I was mouth to mouth with all the car exhausts and ended up feeling like I’d smoked almost as much as the typical Japanese businessman does in an hour.

I also saw very, very few EV charging spots – again, space is an issue here – but I did nearly get run over a few times on back streets by hybrids, of which there seem to be huge quantities.

So I looked this up, and there are almost 13 million hybrid vehicles on the road in Japan. In 2024, HEVs made up 61 per cent of the new car market.

I’ve reported before how the Mazda Museum in Hiroshima has a very detailed plaque explaining why EVs don’t make sense, because, wheel-to-well, they use more energy than a conventional combustion car.

Which is best for the environment: EV or ICE? Here’s the truth about CO2 emissions across the lifecycle of new cars

And you may have noticed yourself just how lackadaisical the approach of some Japanese companies – Toyota for one – has been to fully electrifying their offerings.

If everyone else, and China in particular, is right, then Japan as a country, and its car makers, are going to be left behind.

But as I write this sitting on one of the bullet trains that have been making the rest of the world look a bit slow and stupid since the 1960s, it’s genuinely hard to imagine that being the case.