How Three High-Tech Countries Became Laggards in Electric Vehicles
Japan, South Korea and the US have fallen behind their peers in EV adoption — despite meeting the criteria to be frontrunners.
A lone Tesla charges in the basement of a commercial property in Tokyo.
Photographer: Soichiro Koriyama/Bloomberg
Japan meets all the conditions that should make it a frontrunner in electric vehicles: above-average incomes, a robust auto industry, high rates of new-car purchases, and a culture that generally embraces technology. Instead, electric vehicles made up a measly 1.8% of new cars sold in Japan last year.
Last week, Bloomberg Green published an analysis of the 31 countries that have crossed the tipping point for widespread adoption of fully electric vehicles. Now it’s time to look at the bottlenecks — the countries that aren’t as far along the adoption curve as one might expect.
The EV laggards come in several flavors. The US and South Korea, for example, are a category unto themselves for maintaining a relatively slow pace of EV growth even after EVs surpassed 5% of new vehicle sales, which has otherwise been a consistent tipping point for accelerating sales. We’ll get to them in a bit.