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The story
According to the Nikkei, Germany and France have reportedly agreed to exclude vehicles manufactured in Japan from a proposed EU incentive scheme for EV purchases currently under consideration. On 5ch’s Breaking News+ board, opinions split over whether this exclusion amounts to discrimination against Japan or is simply protection of domestic industry. Against voices arguing “Japan does the same thing by cutting subsidies for BYD,” others pointed to a structural difference between the EU and Japan: “The EU has its own production capacity within the bloc, but Japanese automakers have no prospect of building that.” From there, the discussion spread to EV charging times, Japan’s electricity situation, and battery dependence on China.
EU’s Proposed EV Incentive Scheme Would Exclude Japanese Cars, Germany and France Agree – Nikkei
October 16, 2026, 21:39
[Subscriber-only article]
Source: nikkei.com / Original article here
What people said
Japan's cutting subsidies for BYD too, isn't it?
Japan's doing the exact same thing, with a subsidy gap bad enough to call malicious.
The EU has its own production capacity within the bloc,
like in Eastern Europe,
but Japanese automakers
don't have that kind of
competitive manufacturing capacity
domestically in Japan,
and there's no prospect of them
getting it going forward.
In that sense, it's clearly asymmetric.
https://imgur.com/JIR1WQG.jpeg
Total new vehicle sales:
China: 30 million (60% EVs)
US: 16 million
EU: 13 million
India: 5 million
Japan: 4.8 million (half kei cars)
The only EV [Toyota has] is the bZ4X, and it's not selling that well.
Oh, that's EVs only?
My bad, misread it.
Their diesel scam blew up on them, so this [EVs] is all they can build now.
But the moment Toyota got serious, they casually walked back the gas-car ban.
And now it's "well, just don't buy one."
Thoroughly stupid, environment-wrecking bastards.
They just don't have the technical chops.
Reuse the same engine,
leave the same defects unfixed forever,
and rake it in with rip-off repair fees.
Gas cars never caused this kind of disaster, though — Renault and Fiat were making money off them too.
By then, Japanese cars that used to sell 20 million units a year worldwide
will definitely be down to under 1 million.
At that point, it's seriously game over.
It all comes down to electricity prices in the end.
Japan's electricity is way too expensive, and
on the expressways the only chargers are rip-offs that cost triple what they do on regular roads.
There's talk that BYD might go bankrupt next year, so it's not going to become EVs-only.
Search "China EV" on YouTube and you'll see EVs have plenty of problems.
Japan's power generation capacity is low too, so that's a real problem.
It's the opposite.
Japan depends on overseas sources for 100% of its gasoline,
so EVs are actually better.
Re: #79
Fuel cost is a third of a gas car's.
You just charge at home.
Charging while out is the exception.
Batteries depend on China.
Battery raw materials depend on China too.
Electricity is made using fossil fuels anyway, so diesel and gasoline are obviously better.
If fossil fuel imports stopped, most of the country would lose power.
Internal combustion engines suit Japan.
I don't really get why this is even news.
Well, it's the Nikkei.
If they "spun" this into a piece arguing it's discrimination against Japan, I'd ask "why run that?"
But this is the Nikkei telling Nikkei readers, as plain fact, "here's what looks like it's happening in Europe" — so it's not that strange that it became an article at all, is it?
but it's exactly the opposite.
EVs run on a third of the fuel a gas car needs.
In other words, going EV cuts fuel use down to a third.
Redirect what used to go to gasoline into electricity and there's plenty to spare.
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Nobody's generating electricity by burning gasoline.
Whether there's "enough" electricity isn't just about total volume — there's also output capacity and the wires delivering it.
Run a microwave and a hair dryer at once and the breaker trips, right?
Daisy-chain power strips off the same outlet and the cord catches fire, right?
It's not becoming EVs-or-nothing at all — if anything, people are pulling back from EVs.
The direction is the exact opposite.
Range, the one weak point EVs had, now has plenty of models exceeding 700 km.
In China there are even ones that can charge to 1,000 km of range in 5 minutes.
EVs are now superior across the board, full stop.
So, do you actually drive an EV? A BYD, maybe?
There isn't the power capacity for charging that fast,
and pushing that much current in at once shortens battery life.
Even if the car can handle it, the infrastructure can't keep up.
I'll say it again.
EVs use a third of the fuel of gas cars.
And while gas cars spew harmful exhaust all over town,
EVs produce zero exhaust whatsoever.
None of that matters when actually choosing a car.
There are no charging stations, and Japan doesn't have the electricity to run every car in the country as an EV — at that point, EVs are a wasted investment.
Nothing more than useless clutter.
EVs produce exhaust before they even start driving (the thermal power plant does it for them).
Japan already does something like that — BYD, which hasn't built out charging stations or other infrastructure, apparently gets a smaller subsidy.
Exactly that.
Though knowing the spineless Japanese government, they'll probably let it slide without any countermeasure.
No problem at all.
EVs basically get charged at night, when power demand is low anyway.
More importantly, the benefit of making every gas station across Japan unnecessary outweighs that.
Look, if you're an amateur you shouldn't act like you know it all.
There's no need for fast charging —
almost everyone uses standard home charging.
Charge for 12 hours at home with a regular charger while you're there,
and you get about 350 km worth of range.
And you don't even need to charge that much — just put in
more than you drove that day and it tops up automatically over time.
Please read Re: #212.
Most people don't even drive 50 km a day, so charging at home with a standard charger won't even take an hour and a half.
Taking 12 whole hours to charge, or charging for an hour and a half and only getting 50 km out of it — that's what you call a useless car.
That kind of thing is garbage, not fit for actual use.
So EVs as they are now won't catch on in Japan.
EVs are something to reconsider once solid-state batteries for cars actually arrive. That's the reality of it.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The EU has pursued a de facto ban on new gasoline car sales by 2035, but has repeatedly revised that policy amid sluggish demand and struggles among domestic automakers, and the EV incentive proposal reported here is an extension of that trend. Behind the possibility that Japanese automakers could be excluded lies the fact that the EU has built its own EV production base in places like Eastern Europe, while most Japanese cars are manufactured domestically in Japan — and this asymmetry became the central axis of debate on the thread. At the same time, the Japanese government has also been curbing subsidies for overseas EVs like China’s BYD, so the pattern of “both sides prioritizing their own industry” is common across countries. It’s worth noting that the article alone doesn’t specify which models would be excluded or when such a system would take effect — this is still just the stage of an agreement between Germany and France. Also, some of the replies about charging times and battery dependence on China contain technical misunderstandings, so it’s probably more accurate to read them not for numerical precision but as material showing where anxieties and hopes about EVs currently lie.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “EU’s Proposed EV Incentive Scheme Would Exclude Japanese Cars, Germany and France Agree.”
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