Asia’s EVolution: How Mongolia became a dumping ground for Japan’s hybrid electric vehicles
Over the decade, Mongolia has been flooded with cheap, end-of-life hybrid electric vehicles (EVs) from Japan. The final instalment of a CNA series on Asia’s EVs looks at how the country could be turning into a green technology dumping ground....They can be found in every corner: from the jammed avenues of Ulaanbaatar to the depths of the Gobi Desert.... In 2025, exporter listings show a ten-year-old Prius selling for roughly US$3,000-US$8,000 at source. CNA
The end of the road for ICE and hybrid cars as EVs are now the preferred choice when oil is hitting more than US$100 per barrel. The Japanese automobile industry, the main bread winner of Japan, is dying. Same goes to the American and European car industries. Japan is doing its best to dump whatever available in Mongolia. Now it is used hybrid. Next it will be new ICE cars, Toyota, Honda, Nissan etc etc, when they cannot be sold anywhere else. Japan cannot dump the hybrid in Africa as the cost of transportation will be more than the selling cost of a used car. China is also dumping all its manufactured ICE cars in Africa for a song. Soon China will not be making any ICE cars once the old stocks have been exported. It still makes sense in Africa for ICE cars as many part did not have charging stations for EVs. But this window is closing with Chinese companies putting up a network of charging stations across Africa.
Another big graveyard for unsaleable ICE cars is America. There are billions of them, old and new and finding no buyers. Most would be sold as scraps or junk for their steel. The drawback, no more steel mill in America and these scraps will just pile up in huge dump sites with no where to go.
The death of the ICE industry and the shutting off the source of this lucrative revenue from America, Japan and Europe will take its toll with grave consequences to their economies.
1 comment:
I still remember Japan trying to dump obsolete and outdated washing machines on to the Chinese market when China was still relatively backward. Those we later discovered to be plague by problems, and the Chinese began to dislike them and the dumping ended.
Mongolia is now Japan's dumping ground for unwanted ICE and hybrid cars, what China was to Japan in the past for some consumer products. Japan has now lost the market for consumer product sales in China. Japan was earlier overtaken by South Korea, which in turn was overtaken by China and also Vietnam in the consumer products sector. Japan today is still holding on desperately to its motor vehicle industry, its last bastion of industrial power, but plague by wrong bets in hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. But it was the realization that it cannot compete in EVs against China when raw materials and supply chains had all been dominated by China, which led Japan to fall into its present predicament. Japan then had no choice but to bet on hydrogen fuel cell engines, a direction which failed miserably.
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