Japan becomes the first country with more electric car chargers than petrol stations

Japan has become the first country in the world to boast more electric car charging points than petrol stations. The Asian nation now has 40,000 places to charge an electric vehicle, but only 35,000 traditional petrol stations.

While some of the charging points are privately owned, the remarkable growth in their number has a lot to do with Japanese government subsidies for electric cars. This spurred a large-scale uptake, which in turn made the provision of charging points a viable business offering.

New electric vehicles will cost the same as their petrol-powered counterparts by 2022

As Nissan’s CFO Joseph Peter told The Guardian: “An important element of the continued market growth is the development of the charging infrastructure”, raising the point that in other countries, customers may be put off buying electric cars by the lack of a reliable charging infrastructure. In other words, nobody wants to run out charge in the middle of nowhere.

According to Bloomberg statistics, new electric vehicles will cost the same as their petrol-powered counterparts by 2022. This is predicted to be, according to Bloomberg, “the point of liftoff for sales”. However, this only applies to new cars, as it will be at least another 10 years before electric vehicles have a second-hand market to rival that of traditional cars.

And, in any case, whether or not electric cars can begin to outsell older models, the true tipping point will be when a truly sustainable form of energy production is rolled out to produce the electricity they use in the first place.