This Adorable, Candy-Colored $13,000 Kei Car Is Japan's Best-Selling EV
While EV options in the U.S. are mostly oversized SUVs and trucks, the best-selling EV in Japan is the small, light, cheap, too-cute-for-life Nissan Sakura kei-car.
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Here, Tesla continues to dominate the market and the Big 3 are stalling their EV production due to low demand. In Japan, Nissan is making money hand over first on the little 11-foot long Sakura. Bloomberg found, the competition for best selling EV wasn’t even a contest:
Introduced last year, Nissan Motor Co.’s Sakura — jointly developed with Mitsubishi Motors Corp., which sells it as the eK X — is the best-selling EV in Japan this year, data compiled by Bloomberg shows. The models, which jointly won Japan’s Car of the Year award in 2022, account for roughly half of all EV sales in the country, with 35,099 units sold so far this year, data by auto industry groups showed.
“We launched a kei EV as it suits Japanese people’s everyday needs and road conditions here,” Keiko Kondo, Nissan’s chief marketing manager for Sakura’s domestic business, said in an interview.
The Sakura even won Japan’s Car of the Year award and Kei Car of the Year award in 2022. It comes in four fun colors (well, three fun colors and white) which are reminiscent of iPhone options. Being a kei car, the Sakura is delightfully compact at just 11-feet long. It only gets you 112 miles of range, but that’s perfectly adequate for most people. The Japanese EV market in general is dominated by kei-cars, though fully electric vehicles only made up 1.5 percent of Japan’s auto market last year. Nissan also got a head start on EVs with the Leaf, unlike other Japanese manufacturers which focused on hybrids.
Even our own domestic automakers have cuter, more functional EVs abroad, like the GM-Wuling Mini EV. It’s not fair. Of course, there’s no way a kei-car would meet American crash test standards, and even if one could, would you really want to risk driving a 11-foot EV around when Hummer EVs roam the roadways? I think not.
