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The story
Naoki Inose, a member of the House of Councillors for Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Innovation Party), harshly criticized on X a joint trial by Honda and Taisei Corporation testing in-motion wireless EV charging on expressways (supporting speeds of up to 120km/h), saying “Japan is completely off track.” In response to his point that the construction costs would just drive up expressway tolls while the charging benefit itself is questionable, 5ch saw users agreeing that “the current dominant approach is loading EVs with huge batteries — he’s right that this is off track,” while others countered that “future technological advances can’t be ruled out.” The discussion expanded to cover the feasibility of other next-generation technologies as well, such as synthetic fuel and the maglev train.
Naoki Inose, a House of Councillors member for Nippon Ishin no Kai, posted on his X (formerly Twitter) account on the 6th, sharing his personal view on the trial of wirelessly charging EVs while driving on expressways.
Inose quoted a Nikkei article headlined “EV charging while driving on expressways: Honda and Taisei take on the challenge, supporting speeds up to 120km/h.”
He then wrote sharply, “Japan is completely off track. Doing something this pointless and stupid will just send expressway tolls skyrocketing from the construction costs, and even the charging benefit itself is dubious.”
Source: topics.smt.docomo.ne.jp / Original article here
What people said
Yeah, exactly.
It's not like it's being funded by taxes.
They haven't actually pulled out, though.
Yeah, this really is off track.
>it all comes down to better battery efficiency and faster charging
That's basically impossible because of the laws of physics, which is exactly why BEVs can only ever be a toy for investors.
Let alone in-motion charging.
Resources should go toward fixing aging public infrastructure instead of scam projects like this.
but I'm an old guy, so a gas car suits me better.
You young folks go ahead and buy and try out all kinds of new tech for the sake of progress.
Hearing Aimyon's commercial jingle for it gets on my nerves lol (Aimyon — a popular Japanese singer-songwriter)
Re: #32
Bring back the trolleybus!
Only trucks get run hard enough to actually need in-motion charging — regular EVs are charged at home all the time, so there's no need for it.
In-motion charging lets you cut down on how much battery you need to carry, which is good for both weight and cost.
Batteries have something called the 'memory effect' — if you repeat short cycles of charging and discharging, there's a risk the usable charge range gradually narrows. That's a technical hurdle they'd need to clear first.
(´・ω・｀)
Then just clear the hurdle, no big deal?
Besides, isn't the Shuto Expressway basically always jammed anyway?
If you think of crawling along in traffic as the same as waiting to charge, it's bearable.
In a major earthquake, the power grid would get knocked out too, though…
Sure, for now. Nobody knows what things look like in a few years or a few decades, which is exactly why they're working on it.
No, even given hundreds of years, this is a 100% impossible scam of a project.
Though if, like Re: #92 says, they set up overhead wires for contact-based power collection, that I could actually understand.
Sounds like the kind of guy who'd have laughed at the Wright brothers, saying humans could never fly.
It's fine to trust today's yardstick, but flatly shutting things down by waving around '100% impossible' is pretty out of touch with the times, isn't it? 'AI won't take our jobs!', 'Humanoid robots are impossible!' — things said as unshakeable common sense just a few years ago have already been proven wrong.
You're the one who's off track lol
Those charging poles really were garbage, huh.
Pursuing it is pointless if other countries don't follow along, though.
Might just end up 'Galapagos-ized' like Japanese flip phones did.
It's already been achieved with corn, and it's been decades now,
but it went nowhere because of 'food supply' concerns or whatever.
#Also it wears out farmland.
Theoretically speaking… you could even make biofuel out of Japan's rice straw that just gets thrown away for nothing.
But today's batteries — short range, long charging times — will likely become lost technology too, once swappable batteries or solid-state batteries advance.
They won't.
If we were willing to give up petroleum products like plastics, maybe it could become lost technology, but that's not happening, is it? Gasoline is basically just a byproduct anyway.
With solid-state batteries, the interface between solid materials degrades and delaminates in no time under temperature cycling, so fast charging — which generates heat — is impossible. That's the real lost technology here.
Some people just don't understand what innovation actually means.
If they're doing it without public money, fine, do whatever you want.
But even the maglev, which is leaning on a ridiculous amount of public funding, can't even manage to succeed — how foolish can Japanese people be.
Isn't the maglev a different story, though?
That one would've already been finished if Shizuoka Prefecture had just given the go-ahead.
The maglev's problem isn't the superconductor technology itself.
It's that they're trying to build it underground right through the spot with the biggest obstacles.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The “in-motion wireless charging” project being pursued by Honda and Taisei Corporation is a technology that feeds power to EVs without contact, via coils embedded in the road, with the trial reportedly targeting speeds of up to 120km/h. While it has the advantage of letting EVs carry less battery, it’s also a method that has long drawn criticism over road construction costs and low charging efficiency. Naoki Inose, who oversaw urban infrastructure policy as Governor of Tokyo, appears to be applying a strict cost-effectiveness lens to public investment here. In the thread, opinions split between those who, pointing to how EVs spread worldwide via the big-battery approach, argued that “in-motion charging is inefficient at this point,” and those who countered that “future technological progress can’t be ruled out.” The discussion also expanded to the feasibility of other next-generation technologies like synthetic fuel and the maglev train, making it notable less as a purely technical debate than as a broader argument over the priorities of public investment itself.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Flash+) thread “Naoki Inose shares his view on the in-motion EV charging trial: “Japan is completely off track”.”
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