Aren't those blackouts limited to certain regions?
New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) in China
- Thread starter supercat
- Start date
escobar
Brigadier
A Chinese brand, breaking into the premium to luxury segment. Remarkable achievement.
Why are Japanese automakers hell bent on maintaining the status quo?
Japan has a history of blunders like this. Walkman -> mp3 player/ipod. VHS/Beta -> DVD. CRT TV -> LCD TV. It's possible they will also miss the ICE -> EV transition.
Simply put, they are just really behind...
All the mainstream automakers are releasing or announcing EVs: Ford Mustang Mach-E, GM Chevy Bolt, Nissan Leaf, VW id series, Audi etron series, etc. Who's missing? Toyota and Honda.
Sometimes corporations just have these huge blind spots. The American automakers had this in the 70's and 80's where they did not develop competitive small engines and cars which created the lost decades of 1990s to 2000's.
What's interesting is that this is the second Japanese industry to get blindsided. The first was the consumer electronics... Names you could buy 20 years ago (Toshiba, Sanyo, Panasonic, Sharp, etc.) all gone now. Sony, still around, but not really the leader in anything.
For whatever reason, Japanese companies are not very nimble. Some blame yes-man culture, some blame a propensity for the government to do bailouts, etc.
They didn’t miss VHS to DVD, this was actually the boom time for them as most of the disc manufacturing plants and associated chemicals were all Japanese companies.
They also didn’t miss CRT to LCD. What killed them in LCD was that Korean and Chinese companies were able to ramp up quality really quickly while maintaining the low cost production. I don’t have the technical reasons for this, but they didn’t “miss” it totally like the CD to MP3 example… remember minidisc??
I meant the players. I still remember when VHS players (mostly japanese brands) were >$300 while the DVD players (mostly non japanese brands) were <$200. Needless to say, everyone flocked to DVDs. I remember Japan almost had a monopoly on VHS players, and it was incredibly difficult for a new company to break into it. The advent of DVD was a perfect opportunity. This situation is not unlike the auto industry vis-a-vis the Chinese automakers.
Japanese CRT TVs were dominant. I think just like other consumer electronics (as you mentioned), they held onto it for too long. Trinitron was too profitable for Sony. I agree with you that culture plays into this. In addition, it's a difficult decision for an established player that has been dominant in a field to let go of a cash cow and dive into an unknown. Chinese companies don't have this baggage. They can just go all in.
Regarding LCD, I remember visiting a factory in Kunshan in 2005. It was a $2B factory started by a Taiwanese shoe company. The technology was not that difficult (very few layers and much bigger feature size than ICs). It seemed like there were fabs popping up everywhere in China (significant oversupply). Japanese companies really had no competitive advantage; they simply were never in the game.
I remember minidisc. That was a head scratcher for me.
I think Honda's foray in Formula 1 was a wasted venture that really make their participation worthwhile for their long term health and future of the company. Yes, they were massively dominant during the late 80's and early 90's when they had the perfect partnership with Maclaren under Ron Dennis and having two legendary drivers in Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. Most importantly, the trend of the market was still heavily geared for I.C.E. vehicles since electric vehicles were not yet a major factor into the consciousness of most consumers in today's world. The amount of money spent on this most recent F1 engine supplier deal with Red Bull and others aren't cheap along with the wasted research and development focusing on ICE centric tech when the market trend is continuing to go in the direction of green energy = electrification of mass vehicles.
ICE cars with some minor modifications can run on ammonia. Perhaps Toyota Honda Audi and Renault are counting on that.