Previous memoir episodes series have described how we cracked the code for making content-based promotions in Japan (as with the Puchi Bruce campaign for Die Hard 4.0 explained here), or how we got a taste for building technology solutions (as with the iTunes blogparts explained here). But no account of this period in the late noughties would be complete without documenting the disruptive rise (and rise…. and rise…) of the iPhone, and thence the smart phone, and it certainly had a big impact on the Alien-Eye business too. Zooming forward to 2014 as I write now as Lowe Profero I am sure that more than half of what we output is experienced on a smartphone.

It is hard to believe now with the recent launch of the 5.5inch iPhone 6 that the first iPhone was basically an iPod with telephony. Through our involvement with iTunes we were very much aware of the significance of Apple’s ecosystem of digital content across devices being extended to mobile phones, but we could not have imagined just how disruptive the App Store would be, creating an open market place for software.

As described in Chapter #1, when we set out on the Alien-Eye journey we expected the Japanese mobile carriers to enable an open mobile contents ecosystem, but this was in hindsight very naive of us. So although the bedroom creators and hackers got busy making Flash movies and games that could be freely distributed on the web, they did not have a platform geared to surface and popularise the most creative and original to a wide audience, and mobile content distribution was closed / locked down completely by the close-minded carriers. There certainly was no platform with the allure of coding for a new domain of interaction – the touch screen, combined with accelerometers, GPS and cameras all in one app.

YouTube proved to be that creators’ platform for video, complemented here by the distinctively Japanese video platform NicoNico, but no one could have predicted the phenomenon that was the gold rush onto the App Store, although I am sure some claim they did. All of a sudden designers and videographers, university students and ICT teachers alike were learning to code in C+. We certainly did not miss out either, and the constant stream of mobile app development projects, firstly for iOS, and then for iOS & Android, helped grow and sustain our in-house development team through to late 2011, when as previously lamented on this blog, we admitted defeat on a coding team without scale.

The first iPhones in Japan

Our first iPhone app project happened astride New Year 2007 > 2008, which was even before the first iPhone’s came on sale in Japan in July 2008, and was the first iPhone-related campaign of any kind to my knowledge. We were so desperate to get in on the act that we had someone bring us 3 iPhone’s from Hong Kong that we developed and tested on before promptly handing them to the winners of a travel blogger competition we ran to promote Chile as a tourist destination.

Applicants had to reply to the question “Why I want to go to Chile”, and having been seeded skillfully into young adventurous travel communities in Mixi this contest generated over ten thousand inspiring reasons to do just that, all in the persuasive and credible words of real people, creating a viral mechanism around the campaign. The winning trio were then sent to Chile, armed with an iPhone each and a suite of GPS-aware apps we hacked together to live blog their way around Chile’s stunning locations with instructions to take loads of pictures, and micro-blog about all the fun they were having. These posts were uploaded directly to open community platforms like Twitter as well as auto-aggregated into a live-stream campaign site that we set up.

Chile Tourism Campaign that was made possible by live blogging from GPS enabled apps on an early iPhone

All of this content, as well as the social media buzz, combined with the blog and travel news site coverage of the contest successfully transformed Chile’s online presence and positioning as a destination for young independent travellers. One of the most satisfying aspects of this project was that it fixed Chile’s SEO problem in Japanese. Until that point a search for Chile would yield pages of results relating to either ‘ebi-chili’ recipes, the popular chinese spicy prawn dish, or else the Red Hot Chili Peppers, since both contain the same two katakana characters “CHI-RI” as the country, and are searched for more frequently. Finally, and thanks in some ways to the iPhone, Chile was visible on the web in the Japanese language.

Today the Japanese app store is the most lucrative in the World, for the first time topping the US’s app store revenue in 2013, and now with Android going strong too, sales of game titles on smartphones are fuelling multi-billion-$ game companies’ IPOs and really killing consul makers like Nintendo with it. But back in 2009 when the iPhone sales had just about given the platform enough scale for businesses to take a serious look at it, things were more open and explorative.

Before there were apps, there were….

Our most complete experience with the App store came through a partnership with Tokyo-founded Cerego Inc, and their English learning platform iKnow!, previously named Smart.fm, but because we had already been active on another Apple-popularised platform, podcasting, we were able to adapt our way into apps in effect.

Over 4 or 5 years of working with Cerego I personally enjoyed numerous close working relationships through which I learned an awful lot, and several of those live on as cherished friendships, but it was co-founder Andrew Smith Lewis who brought us in initially and, with his eye for seeing a chance to create eye-catching spin-offs that made the core platform more convivial with the big wide web outside, was an essential supporter and advisor to all the projects we worked on together.

The partnership with Cerego had flourished during 2008 & 2009 thanks mainly due to the amazing success of a podcast program that notched up 10m downloads in its first 2 months after launch and was featured as top podcast in iTunes Japan’s “Rewind 2009” ranking.

The brain child of a talented and passionate Italian multi-media designer, Francesco Romano, he first conceived of the idea of creating podcasts that streamed the multi-media vocab flashcards as a smooth audio-visual experience while he was still working at Cerego. But the company’s focus was elsewhere and so they never got made. Some time later, and for various reasons everyone agreed, including Francesco himself, that he would be better off in the more diverse cut and thrust of the Alien-Eye working culture, and so we got to nurture his podcast idea among many other of his inspired creations.

Enhanced podcast format that used chapter images to create a simple interactive English learning flow c. 2009

Francesco’s podcast hack relied on using the chapters feature in the podcast format, fitting one vocab item plus its accompanying image for each chapter, with audio files playing the audio file for the word, another chapter was used for an example sentence with its audio and image. We could control how many such items we stringed together to make up one podcast. These were interactive to the extent that users could skip between chapter points, although it seemed that most played them hands free on the train commuting.

But how to publish these efficiently? Another invention hooked the old and more hackable version of Garageband, amongst other things a podcast publishing software, to suck in the learning content data from Cerego’s databases and spit out beautifully designed audio-visual podcast.

In this way, Francesco, together with one of Cerego’s own prolific developers, Zev Blut, could generate hours of valuable learning media at will. This “enhanced podcast” format was a game changer on the podcast rankings, since all of the competing pods had to be made in recording studios with costly voice talent and audio engineers. We could produce high quality content much faster and cheaper than anyone else, so we were able to absolutely dominate the rankings. At one point we had 3 separate series created in this way occupying positions 1, 3 and 5 on the all Japan chart, and occupied #1 for most of one year.

To me this is a great example of a “growth hack”, a topic I have spoken and written a lot about in the years since, e.g. this post about growth hacking talent, and Francesco’s approach to turning his vision into reality by thinking fluidly and adaptively across technology platforms illustrates the required mindset.

The app store comes of age

So the first generation of the Smart.fm iPhone apps were based on the enhanced podcasts, but also included games and other interactive features that were developed and improved in later versions. Cerego entrusted us with creating and running this nascent off-shoot of their business, overseeing it of course, but allowing us to design everything, from the product itself, the naming, pricing strategy, promotional activity. We hired an app developer over from the US, Brett Gneiting, who we tracked down after he had been a prizewinner in Cerego’s API competition a year or so previously and he and Francesco formed an awesome UI/UX > coding partnership.

We really embraced this opportunity to take ownership for the performance of a business vertical, and the longevity of the partnership speaks to its financial success, riding the wave of popularity of each iPhone release and all the attention the App Store garnered, bringing in significant revenue for Cerego and keeping us honest too.

One of the most rewarding aspects of having ours hands on every element of the product and marketing strategy was the ability to apply strategic ideas and see very quickly and directly whether they worked or not. When you work on big brands in an agency with a bunch of smart, opinionated marketers you always look at the strategy and think you could write the script better: the client got the naming wrong, or screwed up the pricing strategy, or did not position it in the opportune way; but usually you are not able to change those core elements, and even if you could it would take a relative age to see the effects.

So the app store was almost like a microcosmic market simulator with very rapid and dynamic feedback, so we could tune all those things together with the smart folks at Cerego, Andrew Smith Lewis and Russ Moench in particular, and work out what worked best. In fact it was such an intensely industrious period and we cut our teeth in so many different ways that it spawned a host of different skill sets that we were able to offer to other clients, from short snappy promo videos like these for the first app series, we developed a whole app / web service identity design and positioning strategy offering off the back of this period, and over all it gave us a lot more confidence in our convictions as marketing strategists.

News entries on the Alien-Eye homepage for successive app generation releases c.2010~11

Cerego has developed an extensive and high quality corpus of learning material, and that is what we leveraged for the iPhone and later Android apps. But its secret sauce is when this content gets hooked up to its proprietary learning engine algorithm. For various reasons this could not be encoded into a standalone app, but once Cerego re-booted it’s backend for the cloud era and rebranded as iKnow! made their push as a truly web 2.0 service they were able to provide a seamless experience for their growing paid user base across all devices, and it made sense to phase out the stand-alones. However, the success of the app store partnership set up perhaps an even more empowering collaboration with Cerego that will be the subject of a future memoirs post I suspect.

Over the 2 or 3 years between 2009 and 2011 all kinds of brands were commissioning apps from us, IBM being another noteworthy one, and other agencies too of course. Although I am proud of much of the work we did, most of these programs became forgettable for one of two reasons.

The first was under investment in initial promotion versus development. There would be an intent to make the initial functionality as awesome as possible, leaving little of the inevitably limited budget to launch it properly. It would have been better to get to minimum viability quickly and cheaply and then test the water, but few brands are setup to think in this way.

The second was lack of sustained intent and investment. Like puppies, an app is for life, not just for christmas. Actually, an app is an investment in an engaged user group or audience, and you need to keep improving and developing your app in order to nurture and grown that user group. Marketing departments are sadly not usually empowered or else of a mind to embrace this sort of opportunity.

Since the gold rush era the “I want an app too” effect has warn off, we (now speaking as Lowe Profero) are still developing apps, but they are typically business critical ones, and we have several hundred top class developers to code them. Examples would be a members app for the multi-billion Euro fashion EC businesses like ASOS; the order for app Dominoes Pizza; the loyalty app for booming restaurant franchises like Guzman y Gomez…

The truly cloud-based service models like Cerego, whose team’s live and breath features, UI and UX across all platforms because they are the difference between business success and failure, have in general brought the development in house as you would expect, and so after 2012 we helped them in other ways.

News post on Alien-Eye site on the sad passing of Steve Jobs.

And the app store itself is not the playground of tinkerers and hobbyists that it was in the early days when a developer in her bedroom could create and market an app and earn a million bucks in a month due to the inherent scaleability in and buzz around the marketplace. Some of those early entrepreneurs now run scaled up business around the app store, but most of them have been squeezed out, no longer able to get any visibility as big software and gaming companies have weighed in.

Actually the reasons for the minnows getting squeezed are probably as much to do with the ever increasing number of devices and iOS versions that apps needed to support, and that only got worse when Android swept into Japan. Towards the end of our partnership with Cerego on the app store in late 2011 we really felt this. In the early days of the App Store there were only a few handsets (iPods, iPhone, iPhone 2) and similarly few iOS versions. As Apple released each new wave of iPhones with bigger screens and new iOS versions with new capabilities the development resource required to keep up swelled.

This evolution suited Apple and the Android device makers just fine, since it put more pressure on users to upgrade to the latest model phones, (where most of the revenue is for Apple) and big gaming titles on the App and Play store dominate revenue anyway. So the gold rush with its long tail of entrepreneurs panning for gold came to pass on the big revenue-mining companies moved in. Such is the way of the world, and with its passing Apple too became less of a darling of the creative community, which loved the openness of the early app store. Steve Jobs passed away in October 2011 accompanied by much grief and sadness among us as well as so many others. Perhaps that was the date that marked the end of this chapter for us too.

The post Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo Memoirs Chapter 6: The app store gold rush appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Ginger has developed a super-smart hybrid technology that combines NLP and statistical algorithms to process all the English that is out there on the web, and using this enormous corpus as a reference, corrects non-native English as the user types.

Like Japan, Hebrew-speaking Israel is an island nation in terms of language, and so they have similar challenges when it comes to communicating in English. They also have one of the most fervent technology development cultures on the planet. Ginger is a product of that context, and I believe is a ground-breaking technology that has the potential to lower the language boundaries between cultures globally through supporting accurate and expressive communication in English.

Ginger’s take on cognition is just one area of this burgeoning field, and the article discusses the bigger picture, as well as explaining more about Ginger’s approach to it.

The article first appeared in one of Japan’s leading tech news sites, The Bridge, in December 2013 in English and Japanese, where naturally, as my client, Dudu got the credit. The main audience was Japanese, so a bit more effort went into the Japanese script, and I have rewritten some of the more awkward phrasing for the English version below.

************

Cognition-as-a-Service will come of age in 2014

Here at Ginger we are predicting that 2014 will be remembered as the year that CaaS, or “Cognition-as-a-Service” platforms came of age. Cognition is historically a complex biological trait including skills such as decision making, problem solving, learning, reasoning, working memory and not least language, skills that today the computer sciences are chipping away at from various angles.

With each major evolutionary step in computing we have seen over the last 30 years, from mainframes to PCs, the internet, cloud and SaaS, and now ubiquitous smart mobile, the new realm has not so much replaced but augmented what was there before.

In the same way the promise of CaaS is to allow apps and services to function more intelligently and intuitively, allowing you to converse with them, ask questions, give commands and complete tasks more efficiently and conveniently.

Apple’s Siri is one of the most famous cognition-based services in general use today. And now Google’s recent innovations to its search product for mobile, incorporating more contextual conversation for queries, pits Google’s AI technology against Siri in the cognition-augmented search arena. In both cases, most of the technology itself is in the cloud, even though the device is in the user’s hand. Their main functions only work when there is an internet connection.

Natural Language Processing

The reason for this is that the two necessary tricks to make sense of a user’s speech input – speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP) – require cloud-based servers performing intensive processing of proprietary algorithms, and these processes are beyond the capabilities of handheld technology.

NLP-type processing is so intensive because of the sheer diversity and complexity comprised by a language like English. Old school NLP solutions were based on rigid rules that map inputs to a big list of known inputs. But the list can never be long enough, and the hard rules can never cover all the edge cases that appear naturally in language. This is why the experience of talking to a supposedly “smart assistant” has so far always left the user frustrated and feeling misunderstood, since they have up until recently been built using the hard wired rule-based approach.

You need more powerful, agile technologies that can figure out that in a sentence such as: “Yuko wants to eat an apple”, Yuko is something that can have wants, and can eat things, and that apples are things that can be eaten. The technology needs to be able to do this for the vast majority of sentences the app is likely to encounter. This is incredibly hard, but here at Ginger and a few other places, we are doing it.

The “Platform Model”

It is not just Apple and Google who are eyeing this new technology realm. IBM is now also a player with Watson, recently announcing that the same supercomputer-strength software that conquered the quiz show “Jeopardy!”, will be available to app developers through an API and software toolkit. This will allow cognitive apps that leverage cognition to be hosted in the cloud on Watson. This would obviously be a great thing for IBM’s cloud hosting service as well.

This “platform model” in tech business is nothing new of course. In recent years IBM did this with its Websphere application server technology, which went from an internal project to a software community of thousands of developers. Salesforce.com did this with its Force cloud-app development platform, as did Amazon with Amazon Web Services.

But what is different with CaaS platforms is that cognitive powers will be baked in to the operating system, and all the apps that are developed on that platform. That will bring intelligence to a mass public in a wide variety of as yet unimagined contexts.

Gingers Approach to Cognition

At Ginger we have not opened up our technology as a platform via an API yet, but we are already providing the benefits of its cognitive powers to a mass user base globally. Our technology uses statistical algorithms in conjunction with natural language processing, referencing a vast database of trillions of English sentences that have been scoured from the web. This allows us to work out what the users of our applications are trying to communicate, be it in Microsoft Office apps, Gmail, Facebook or anywhere else for that matter, and correct their mistakes and suggest improvements to their expressions.

One thing is for sure – this is a really interesting space to work, and it will be fun to see where computer based cognition will go in 2014.

The post Cognition as a Service – a new Hybrid Technology appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

The published article was much whittled down, and although it may be an easier read, it left out several of the more interesting cultural nuances that makes LINE so appealing, as well as its cultural-hybrid origins, so I have belatedly printed my original draft below.

The Marketing Interactive version can be seen here.

Facebook losing out to LINE in capturing Japanese hearts

On the face of it Facebook have a lot to be smug about when looking at their Japanese footprint.

The original Japanese social network Mixi is in rapid decline, and Facebook now boasts 21m local active monthly users. This has grown rapidly from around four million a couple of years ago, with 86% of users on mobile compared to the global average of 71%. And what’s more Facebook announced in August that it was going to double its Japanese workforce to boost the local advertising business.

All this in a society that many said would never accept a service that does not allow its users to remain anonymous! It just shows how attitudes can change.

Facebook’s user profile is also ideal for many brands, mirroring the demographic bulge of Japan’s population that peaks around the late 30s. The children of the baby boomers are the sweet spot for many brands, and I for one do not see Facebook losing this strength any time soon.

However, exploring the digital landscape a little closer there are some worrying signs for Facebook. Some of which are the same concerns that are levelled everywhere, namely that it never worked out how to monetize mobile, and others which are uniquely Japanese in origin.

Primary among these is the explosive growth of the mobile chat app LINE. Inspired by the wake of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, or so the story goes, LINE has broken all records on the way to 250 million users globally, 43 million of who are in Japan. Underpinning this meteoric rise has been LINE’s cute UI and simple UX, which reduces to a minimum the number of taps required for all the basic social mobile operations, like adding friends, sharing photos with a selected group etc.

But what makes LINE stand out among the handful of other chat apps currently boasting these kind of user numbers, such as WhatsApp, Viber, and WeChat is its phenomenal ability to monetize its user base.

Unlike Facebook which is now more or less limited to advertising, LINE sells digital goods such as the “stamps” that its users converse with in the chat threads, as well as game credits. And it’s working. In the second quarter of 2013 LINE generated $100m in revenue. That’s one reason it’s a model that is starting to be mimicked by competitors across the globe.

For Japan’s users, who were raised on an image-rich diet of manga characters and anime, the stamps are the easiest and most charming way to express those everyday feelings that friends exchange. In fact they were designed exactly for that purpose, each one mapping to a commonly shared feeling like “I’m exhausted”, or “having fun!”, using 4 original LINE characters as the grammar of this visual language.

Starting with the default set of stamps, users can then buy new stamps for around $1.70 a pop, or else download free stamps from the sponsored gallery, in which brands pay for their own characters to be featured. Many of the stamps that Japanese users buy are manga characters from classic titles they read when they were growing up, so when shared among friends who all know the story and hence the context of the shared frame, the communications exchanged become nuanced with more subtle meaning and personality.

Contrast the layered richness of this communication with the “like” on Facebook, its often baffling privacy settings, and the fact that you have to mind what you post since your boss might have friended you, it is no wonder LINE is where friends prefer to hang out together.

LINE’s growth has so far largely come in East Asia where the same “high context, low content” culture predominates, but what is perhaps surprising is how popular it is proving elsewhere. It has jumped to 10 million users in India in the space of a couple of months having hired a top Bollywood actress as its ambassador, passing 15m users in Spain and is now targeting South America. It is likely to hit 300m users this year and there is talk of an imminent IPO.

Some of us wondered whether Japan, so long a hardware juggernaut and console gaming industry heavy hitter, would ever break its duck in the web services arena. In hindsight it makes total sense that it would take a mobile app with a uniquely visual UX that can be personalized to reflect the visual culture of its users, wherever they are, to have universal appeal.

Although made for Japan, it is an offshoot of a Korean company, NAVER, that realised they had already lost their home market to the chat app Kakao, and so targeted Japan, the closest next market, with a copycat that became LINE. Although late to the party, it is interesting that it is LINE that is now challenging the world, while Kakao is hardly in the running at a global level.

It is possible that by having to adapt the Korea-originated smart phone chat experience for Japan, a market that is similar but not identical to Korea in terms of mobile culture, gave LINE enough cultural flexibility to then make the jump to other markets, including beyond Asia. It almost certainly helped in terms of baking a cross cultural mindset into the culture of the company.

As smart phone adoption continues to grow exponentially around the world it is easy to imagine how a native app built around the universal appeal of emotive images, monetized through digital goods will continue to have Facebook’s sushi lunch from Tokyo to the ends of the earth.

The post Why LINE is eating Facebook’s sushi lunch appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

These days hybrid technologies are equally if not more common. Among these hybrid cars are the most famous, a technology popularised largely due to the efforts of the Japanese car industry, not least the little known parts supplier Aisin Seiki Co. which invented the Hybrid Synergy Drive that made the Prius an international hit.

Simplified diagram of the hybrid drive train

Hybrid cars represent the classic hybrid concept: take two complementary species or systems, combine them to create a new species or solution that comprise the advantages of both systems, and at the same time mitigating their weaknesses. This article describes the current state and popularity of hybrid cars in Japan, and the effect the technology has had on driving transport technologies forward globally.

The 2 top selling cars in Japan are Toyota’s smallest hybrid models – the relatively new Aqua, and the world famous Prius. The same was true in 2012, when Honda’s Fit and Freed came in at #3 and #4, both of which had strong selling hybrid models. Here is the top ten sales ranking for the period April ~ September 2013:

1. Aqua (Toyota) 127,993 (-2.3%)
2. Prius (Toyota) 121,634 (-19.2%)
3. N-Box (Honda) 110,155 (-7.0%)
4. Move (Daihatsu) 107,591 (+44.5%)
5. Wagon R (Suzuki) 88,071 (-8.7%)
6. Mira (Daihatsu) 76,690 (-26.6%)
7. Fit (Honda) 67,918 (-33.2%)
8. Note (Nissan) 66,259 (+101%)
9. Spatia (Suzuki) 64,003 (NA)
10. Tanto (Daihatsu) 60,069 (-31.8)

The interesting thing to note about the rest of the top 10 is that they are all ultra-low gasoline consumption vehicles, hybrids or not. Toyota’s “Hybrid Synergy Drive” is so smart and expensive to develop that makers like Suzuki and Daihatsu have been forced to compete on fuel efficiency without such trickery, but instead by shaving away inefficiency from the traditional engine & power train set up, and by making the car itself lighter. So successful have they been with this approach that Daihatsu now boasts near-comparable fuel efficiency with Toyota and Honda’s hybrids, at much cheaper price points. It is interesting to note that Toyota have a majority stake in Daihatsu, so they are winning at both ends of the market.

The Honda Fit, previously at #1, will likely bounce back to near the top of the sales ranking with its new model released in September 2013 that claims the highest fuel efficiency of any car in Japan, at 36km/l (86mpg), and with its reinvented drive train and dual clutch, and an EV only start that will bring it more in line with Toyota’s hybrid driving experience. Honda have just started building a second production plant in Brazil, the 4th biggest car market globally where they are already 7th in the market on sales. They see the Fit type car and its hybrids as being very relevant to Brazil’s growing fuel-cost-conscious middle class.

Although many of Japan’s relatively affluent and brand conscious middle class will prefer a Toyota with a Hybrid Synergy Drive badge or a Honda with its own version, the low cost highly efficient manufacturing techniques developed by the other brands are very relevant to emerging markets, like Suzuki’s stake in the Indian car market for instance or Daihatsu in Indonesia. In other words, the innovations for Toyota have made the Japanese car market very lean and competitive when it comes to fuel, and hence more relevant to growth markets.

This competitiveness has likely contributed to Japanese makers’ strength as OEM suppliers as well. Toyota’s hybrid drive supplier, Aisin Seiki Co., which Toyota has a minority stake in, supplies drive trains to Ford, NISSAN and Mazda. Suzuki’s are sold with GM badges all over the world, as Maruti-Suzuki in India, to name just a few relationships.

The advantage of hybrid technologies is often misunderstood. The common perception is that because half the time the car is not using the combustion engine, it is more fuel efficient. Although this is somewhat true with Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive, the real advantage is that the electric engine adds power when the car is accelerating, meaning that a smaller combustion engine can be used to deliver a satisfactory acceleration. The energy used is generated by the motion of the car itself and recovered during braking, which is itself very efficient, but the main efficiency is having a smaller engine that uses less gasoline.

This situation is somewhat analogous to Apple computers being faster than PCs despite having slower clock speed processors, because of the holistic hardware-software design – they make more of what they have got.

But are hybrid cars inherently better than gasoline only cars? Based on fuel efficiency, yes they are. Since they combine the advantages of energy recovery you get with an electric drive train, and hence smaller combustion engine, with the range and piece of mind of having a full tank of gasoline, it is the classic “best of both worlds” hybrid solution.

But do you ever make back the incremental cost of buying a hybrid car over a conventional gasoline car? If you drive a taxi it is an easy equation, and indeed all the Toyota Crown taxis in Japan are steadily giving way to Prius. For those drive less, maybe the incremental cost will never be made back in fuel savings. Also, when you factor in the energy costs of producing a hybrid car, particularly the batteries, and the relatively short life of those batteries, are they actually better for the environment overall? Some argue that they are not, although battery technology is improving all the time and personally I see this as a necessary investment to get the world to a more eco transportation system.

As noted above, hybrids have made the whole market more energy efficient, so their contribution to reducing overall emissions is already noteworthy. Anecdotally there are now so many hybrids on the roads in Tokyo that gasoline stands are having a hard time and many have closed down.

Europe has also been on a trajectory to higher fuel efficiency, but with a quite different solution – diesel engines, despite the relatively dirtier exhaust fumes. Japanese makers like Toyota, Honda and NISSAN are all geared up to sell in the car-obsessed US, which makes Europe’s infatuation with diesel engines particularly perplexing, and is one of the reasons that German and French cars have such a stranglehold there. Indeed Toyota have even been forced into doing a deal with Mercedes to supply diesel engines for some of their European models, while Nissan’s Alliance partner Renault supply them with their 1.5L diesel engines which are used in a huge range of cars and trucks for both Nissan and Renault.

A compelling side plot in the hybrid arms race comes from Mazda. They have their own version of hybrid, that they refer to as “the cross over without compromise”: a compact SUV that they claim has the best highway MPG of any SUV, including hybrids. Their “SKYACTIV” engine range achieves this by “reimagining every component to work together in unprecedented harmony”. It seems that the hybrid era has driven the Japanese “Kaizen” philosophy of incremental improvement to proven technologies, in this case the internal combustion engine to new levels.

However, Mazda are using diesel to solve the same problem that Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive solves, that of how to deliver powerful acceleration with a small engine. Electric motors are very good at delivering torque, and as it turns diesels can be as well. SUVs need high torque, because their drivers want strong acceleration despite their vehicle’s bulk, and so big engines are required. Even the Lexus hybrid SUVs only do 16km/l (38 mpg) or so. Mazda’s 2.2l SKYACTIV-D diesel engines advantage comes through a “revolutionary” low compression ratio as explained here. Packaged inside the compact SUV Atenza model it can do 20km/l +, and deliver the same torque as a 5l gasoline engine.

New Diesel engine technology rivals hybrid engines

When it comes to reducing emissions industrial transportation is just as if not more important than personal transportation, particularly in Japan where so many commute by public transport. Hybrid drive trucks and delivery vans are becoming increasingly common, and both the electric hybrid and low compression ratio diesel innovations are being delivering that high torque with small engines are even more significant to haulage vehicles.

Given all this innovation and augmentation of the internal combustion engine technology, you can see why EVs are struggling to get to mass scale, despite the massive commitment made byTesla, NISSAN with the LEAF and the VOLT from Chevrolet, since they share the same battery costs problem with the hybrids, only they are more critical, and yet do not yet deliver the range and piece of mind you get with the gasoline tank and gasoline stand infrastructure, at least in terms of consumer perception.

Also, although electricity has an inherently cleaner image than gasoline, when all your country’s electricity is generated by fossil fuel, as is the case in Japan since the nuclear reactors, the only viable low carbon energy source available at the moment, were switched off, there is no ecological advantage to electricity unless you are generating your own solar, and even then you are still dependent on the grid. All you are doing is changing the location of where you burn the fossils.

I believe 100% in the future of electric cars. Already they are becoming quite common in Tokyo and their extensive range and the growing charging infrastructure makes them a viable choice, and also popular with car-sharing services. I really hope they become ubiquitous, combined with zero carbon electricity generation, but current battery technologies are still seen as a limiting factor for a lot of their would-be drivers. The fact that hybrids share similar limitations on the electric side, particularly now with the “plug in hybrids”, but are able to sell in bigger volume because they comprise the benefits of a gas tank, and hence help to drive down battery production cost and drive battery technology forward at the same time, hybrids are in many ways helping the EVs in the long run.

Nissan Leaf – viable EV

There is a psychology dimension to this as well. Hybrids and now plug-in hybrids are getting the average driver accustomed to the idea of electric powered cars. Also, by becoming a mass selling option hybrids create a market for those who want to go that little bit further in the ecological dimension. If the Toyota Prius had not been such a mass seller, would as many people chosen to buy Tesla?

Whether hybrids provide the best of both worlds is a subjective judgement, but the fact that hybrid cars have transformed the car market by putting pressure on all technology platforms to reduce fuel consumption and emissions is beyond doubt, and demonstrates that there are still areas where Japanese innovation is changing the world.

The post Hybrids rule in Japan, and are taking over the world appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.