In today's Japan, the energy-saving performance of electric cars is no different from that of hybrid cars.

In today's Japan, electric cars are no different from hybrid cars...
Kazuya Matsuo · Friday, November 2016, 11
As I have written many times before, Toyota will soon release a plug-in hybrid Prius. The day before yesterday, Nissan released an electric car (hybrid car) that only uses the engine as a generator. It can be said that we are on the way to moving on to another step beyond the era when hybrid cars were mainstream.
Here I would like to write about an important fact that is rarely written in car magazines or even on the Internet. Most people may think that "electric cars do not emit CO2," but that is not true at all. If you trace the charger back to the local power company, it will end up burning coal, gas, or oil to generate electricity. The only difference is whether the car burns gasoline or it is cheap to trace it back to the power plant.
So does that mean electric cars are completely pointless?
So, I'd like to summarize some of the things I've been talking about in recent lectures.
First of all, the average car usage for an average Japanese household is 13km/L, with the average person driving XNUMXkm per year.
The primary energy consumption in this situation is about 27GJ. I have probably spoken about this story more than XNUMX times in my lectures.
My father currently drives the latest Prius, and its actual fuel economy is about 2km/L.
This means that the annual primary energy consumption is approximately 13.5GJ.
Here, we calculated the fuel economy of the Nissan Leaf, a representative electric vehicle. Since it is meaningless to use the catalog fuel economy figures, we took the average from websites where Leaf owners have published their actual fuel economy figures.
The resulting annual primary energy consumption was a whopping 13.5GJ!!
I did the calculations myself and was surprised to find that the environmental impact of the Prius and the Leaf in terms of fuel economy is exactly the same. Also, when you consider the energy required to manufacture the batteries, it's even possible that the Prius might be more eco-friendly.
However, even when making the same comparison, things are completely different when you take these two cars to Europe and compare them.
For example, in Germany, about 30% of the fuel used at power plants comes from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. In this case, the Prius runs on gasoline in the car itself, just like in Japan, but in the case of the Leaf, 30% of the energy required is met by renewable energy. Naturally, this translates into less CO2 emissions.
As a result, plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles are rapidly increasing in Europe at an even greater rate than in Japan.
In Japan, the fierce competition between electric cars and fuel cell cars is in the spotlight. However, fuel cell cars are still based on the premise that hydrogen is produced by separating it from gas. In any case, it seems necessary to increase the use of renewable energy in order to realize the environmental benefits of these two methods.
However, even if this is not the case, there are still secondary benefits. If an electric vehicle is fully charged, it can store enough electricity to power an average household for about three days. This is more than enough as a backup power source in the event of a disaster. In addition, if CO2 capture technology develops in the future, it will have the advantage of being easier to capture CO2 in one place.
However, I always think that it is a characteristic of Japan that industries move forward without considering the bigger picture like this.