Just a few hours into the 2023 Japan Mobility Show, Honda’s chief executive had said he wanted to see the company’s logo in outer space. The head of Lexus had promised luxury cars with a sense of smell. The president of Subaru, from a great nebula of dry ice, had unveiled a conceptual flying car which may, eventually, fly.
The signs of stress are less subtle than they used to be. Too much talk of the future reveals a chasm in the present, and as such Japan’s biggest automotive trade show acts as a gauge of how hard the country’s once unstoppable carmakers are ready to fight for survival. Increasingly it looks like an industry waiting for a miracle.
The trillion-dollar question is whether solid-state batteries — a technology that promises greater range and safety than lithium-ion ones, and which Toyota has indicated it is near to mass producing — can be that miracle.