As electric cars' prospects brighten, Japan fears being left behind

At a factory near the base of Mount Fuji, workers painstakingly assemble transmissions for some of the world’s top-selling cars. The expensive, complex components, and the workers’ jobs, could be obsolete in a couple of decades. The threat: battery-powered electric vehicles.

Their designs do away with the belts and gears of a transmission, as well as thousands of other parts used in conventional cars. Established suppliers are nervous, especially in Japan, where automaking is a pillar of the economy — and where industrial giants have been previously left behind by technological change.

“If the world went all-EV today, it would kill my business,” said Terry Nakatsuka, chief executive of Jatco, the company that owns the transmission factory, using a shorthand term for electric vehicles.

With 7,000 workers, Jatco is part of a vast ecosystem of carmakers and suppliers that provides one in 10 Japanese jobs. Japan is scrambling to ensure it has a future in an electric-car world. Toyota, the country’s largest automaker, pioneered gasoline-electric hybrids but has long been sceptical about consumers’ appetite for cars that run on batteries alone. Now, under pressure from foreign rivals like Tesla, the company says it is developing a batch of new electric models.

The Japanese government has made managing the shift to next-generation vehicles a priority, but critics say its approach lacks focus. It has bet big on hydrogen fuel cells, an alternative technology to plug-in rechargeable batteries that is struggling to win widespread support.

The fear is that once again, Japan will miss a big technological shift. In the consumer electronics sector, the transition to new products like flat-screen televisions and digital music players undermined once-ubiquitous Japanese brands. Innovation in the digital era became the domain of Silicon Valley, while mass production shifted to China. As a result, some storied names in the world of technology — Sharp, Toshiba, Sanyo — have disappeared or no longer resonate with the world’s consumers the way they once did.

©2018 The New York Times News Service