SAYONARA! Is JAPAN being left behind? And JACK's 'gear' change!

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1:37Hello and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast. It's a lovely episode for me because I've had to walk all of five meters from my bed to get to the studio. Jack has had to travel considerably further. Thank you very much for coming, Jack.

1:52Imogen Bhogal:And thank you for putting some trousers on. We did have to ask twice, but we got there in the end. So thanks for that, Bobby. It's a shame. The shame will never leave me. Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean energy tech are funded by our fun-packed Test Drive-tastic events in the UK and Australia. Next up, Everything Electric Greater London, and then Sydney. All events include a B2B EV day and commercial vehicles too. Because you've been away, it sounds amazing what you've been doing. So can you explain what you've been doing? Because it's nothing to do with everything we do. It was nothing to do with everything electric.

2:31It was a sabbatical.

2:32Imogen Bhogal:I took a sabbatical. I have been at Fully Charged for five years. My girlfriend is doing a big, scary, exciting career change. and we thought this is the moment to blow the savings account and go on the trip of a lifetime. So we spent a month traveling around Vietnam and three months traveling around Japan, never staying in one place more than four or five nights, renting little K cars and road tripping around rural regions, a lot of walking up volcanoes and a lot of eating noodles, actually. It was the trip of a lifetime. It was absolutely spectacular. I highly recommend to anyone just taking four months off work and sacking off all your adult responsibilities and visiting Asia.

3:16Imogen Bhogal:That's accessible, relatable advice that we could all heed. It was a spectacular trip. Because Vietnam, I've never, I have been to Japan. I've never been to Vietnam. My wife's been to Vietnam a lot and so she knows it quite well. But I mean, for our generation, it has such a resonance because of the Vietnam War that happened from when I was born until I was probably 22 or something, 25, I don't know. So that was such a big, and it was the first sort of really big media war. So we saw it and it was on the telly every night. And I know Vietnam has changed dramatically since those years. So it must be, and it sounds like the most amazing country.

3:51I mean, was it fun in there?

3:54Imogen Bhogal:It was astounding. Just quickly on the Vietnam War, one of the first things we did when we got there was in Ho Chi Minh City, we went to the Vietnam War, I think it's now called the Vietnam War Memorial Museum or something. But they've walked it back from its previous name, which I believe was the Museum of American Atrocities. Yes. And before that, it was called the Ha Ha We Beat You in Your Face America Museum. It's gone through a few rebrands, which I think is a shame. I prefer the old name. Yeah, it's an astonishing country and just a story of sort of hyper evolution taking place now. It's this surreal blend of very, very old and very, very traditional and very, very rural and then hyper-modern, super high-tech.

4:41Imogen Bhogal:I remember Imogen and Andy went out with Vinfast a couple of years ago and came back with these dystopian stories of what they had seen there. They're building massive things so fast. There's cars everywhere now. That's happened in the last 10 years since I first went there as a teenager. No, that's not true. I was an adult 10 years ago. Damn it! Yes! 15 years ago, whenever it was. so there's Vinfast cars everywhere now but there's also these they're just building enormous kind of hotels and apartment buildings and there's a company called Vin Group which owns Vinfast also owns Vinpearl which is the kind of knockoff Disneyland and Vin this and Vin that and there's I think barely an element of life in Vietnam not touched by this one mega corporation um and for example we went to this beautiful beach island called fukok we stayed in a little cove and you know bamboo shacks on the beach and there's kayaks and you can just help yourself and paddle out and you go my god we're the only two people in the world you get on your scooter you go round the corner and they've built a vinpearl sort of knock off disneyland wow giga theme park and there's a fake tiny venice and vietnamese people wearing sort of stripy long-sleeved tops like venetians gondoliers.

6:01Very strange experience.

6:03Imogen Bhogal:So you can see that enormous change is happening in that part of the world at the minute. And yeah, part of that story is electric vehicles, which they're better at than Japan. Right. That's interesting. I do remember when we had a show in San Diego, the first time I saw whatever model it was, the VinFast car was on display there, which for me was so symbolic of this is America, where they're in a way the home of the car and here's a vietnamese car on sale in in in america but i don't know that they've you know i sort of heard a lot about it then and i'm talking this probably seven or eight years ago i've not are they does that company still exist are they still making cars because they they're not you don't see them here i mean my vague understanding is that they've done an awful lot for getting Vietnam onto four wheels.

6:59Imogen Bhogal:But a lot of the rest of the world were less than favorable when reviewing their products because we have seen cars before. We sort of have a benchmark. Yeah, I think the early reviews of Vinfast products that came over here were less than favorable. So they might be focusing slightly more on their own market for the time being. But, you know, as with Chinese cars, as with Korean cars before those, they'll just get better. The engineering will just get tighter. So the company is still producing cars. Oh, the company is still going straight. Right, right. Oh, that's good. But then Japan is more of a mystery for us in this country because of the incredible success of Japanese car companies in the last, say, 50 years post-war.

7:46you know i mean that and the there's that pattern i always feel that pattern was originated with japanese so when i was a kid a japanese car rubbish guaranteed rubbish it'll fall to bits it looks weird who's ever going to buy a japanese car it went from that to going no one can keep up with the japanese they're way ahead of everyone else it's the most amazing cars in the world and they make them more of them and they're cheaper and they work and then hybrids, Toyota with hybrids, were way ahead of everybody else. Honda and Toyota doing hybrids was like 10 years in advance of anyone else. Incredible dominance.

8:22And that now, well, I don't know, it feels like that's shifted because of China. I mean, in such a dramatic way.

8:29Imogen Bhogal:Yeah, and that thing you just described, incidentally, has happened in my lifetime for Korean cars, I feel, where they were kind of the laughing stock. Like, ooh, Hyundai, no longer the case. kind of at the cutting edge now. It's always worth remembering that, incidentally, when we drive a new Chinese car and it's a bit crap in certain ways. It's important not to be sneery because we've seen this before. We've seen how quickly these new markets can get right to the very top in terms of the kind of quality of what they're doing. What was the question? Where's Japan at now? Where's Japan at now?

9:04Because the take I've had from talking to a Japanese person in the States years ago was japan doesn't have the advantage of being able to do like he was comparing it to here we we can't they can't do offshore wind and and that was really interesting i had no idea about that so uh so here's england and scotland and ireland and wales and it's like that that's the land and then it goes like that and that's the sea and it's miles out it's this deep the sea so you can put in wind turbines really easy japan that's japan it's like just hugely deep like Like 500 metres off the coast of Japan is proper deep water.

9:44So doing offshore wind for Japan, which you'd think would make sense. They're an island. They've got wind all around them. They're going to be there all the time. It's a whole different ballgame.

9:53Imogen Bhogal:Nor can you really do onshore wind, because one of the most interesting maps I've ever seen is a map of all the population density in Japan outside of the bits that are mountains and volcanoes. And you think of Japan as quite a sparsely populated place. No, every single bit of flat, livable terrain that is not a cliff is occupied by people. So yeah, we should precurs this by saying there are basically no EVs in Japan still. A staggeringly few on the road. I saw one new Nissan Leaf. I thought I'd see a few of those. Yeah, yeah. There's a handful of electric K cars. When you get to Tokyo, especially in the more affluent bits, you might see a couple of Model S's and electric McCanns.

10:36Imogen Bhogal:but it is still a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the fleet in Japan, which is kind of paradoxical when you think of it as this techie, futuristic place. The people, they absolutely commercialised the use of lithium-ion batteries. I mean, it was definitely then. They were invented up the road in Oxford, but they were commercialised by Sony and other electronics companies. I mean, we're talking 50, 40 years ago. You know, so they got that technology. They absolutely sussed it. They made it better. They improved it. They developed things so that all our camcorders and early Sony Walkman, they were cool.

11:16Imogen Bhogal:I remember them well. Yeah, it's an interesting, you know, now when I think about, we sort of, we have spent years bashing these Japanese brands, just going, what are they doing? Why are they not so...