TOKYO, July 2, 2024—While the world is seeing the country as a tourist destination and has written off as an industrial power house that it was once, Japan is devising a stealth digital economy strategy to make it the largest manufacturers of what it calls the software defined vehicle that drives on its own without a driver.
Call it a pipe dream or hog wash, government officials are dead serious about the SDV project that’s a core part of the country’s digital economy transformation named the ‘Mobility DX Strategy,’ engaging private-sector automakers, digital nerds and academia experts to sit on a special committee to hash out long PDF documents that to lay people are cryptic and a big bore.
(https://www.meti.go.jp/policy/mono_info_service/mono/automobile/jido_soko/mobilitydxsenryaku3.pdf)
It would mobile all conceivable digital technologies including next-gen semiconductors, generative AI, autonomous driving, high-speed telecom, among them. SDVs can be used for robo taxis, regular private cars, buses and trucks.The SDV project aims to manufacture and sell 12 million SDVs in Japan and globally by 2030 and boost output to 19 million by 2035, which would be about 3/10th of global SDVs to be sold.
Is this a viable, serious project? Yes, for those eIT geeks at churning out smart PDF documents on PCs. That’s what they did in drafting this colorful document.
AN ABSOLUTE NO in the real world. For one, Japan barely has 20,000 EV charging stations as of March 2024, little changed from a year ago and of which quick charging accounted for less than half. The country aims to have 150,000 charging stands (different from the number of stations that may have more than two stands).
Having far more EV stations is vital for the SDV project as one of the Mobility DX Strategy’s core aim is greenhouse gas emissions reductions, along with hydrogen mobilization for which filling stations totaled 171 as of March 2024, hardly changed from several years ago and still short of the 200 target that Japan set 10 years ago. Without clean energy, SDVs won’t take off.
Another challenge is building high-speed telecom lines all over Japan for stable, constant connections between SDVs and servers and other stationary hubs. For it, 5G or faster signals are absolutely necessary by even on smart phones, many Japanese people use 4G phones, and telecom carriers are slow to moving to faster signals for cost reasons, particularly in rural areas, where signals often are lost now.
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