The Reason We Bought Tesla

Nissan Leaf

This exact vehicle is the reason we bought our first EV (electric vehicle) company car. Four years ago, Autobacs, a leading car parts store/automotive chain in Japan gave us a Nissan Leaf as a loaner car while they fixed our ICE (internal combustion engine) car. The Leaf was like driving a radio controlled toy car with such peppy acceleration and ease of use. It was fun to drive.

When it came time to get another company car we looked at Nissan and Tesla EVs. The Tesla was somewhere around 400,000 JPY (or around $4000 USD) more expensive. We opted for the Tesla for two reasons-

  1. We concluded that Tesla was stronger on the software side of things over Nissan
  2. Tesla is a customer so we like to support those who choose our products.

We made an excellent decision. In the three years since acquiring or first test, we have seen Tesla constantly updating their software (12-15 times). Our ICE cars navigation systems never got updated once you drove them off the lot. Most importantly, the range of the vehicle is still 500+km.. three years later. As we looked at the car the other day, the Autobacs executive mentioned that the vehicle (pictured above) is lucky to get 100km on a full charge.

Electric cars are great, but if you haven’t got a solid charging network behind them stick with gasoline. Our Teslas have been all over Japan transporting our engineering team doing service on Japan’s best communication service provider (CSP) CIRCLE Cloud Communications.

Great to see people developing useful products like Tesla.

The Cost Of Living

Fuel Prices At A Japan Gas Station

Just about 4 years ago we saw fuel prices in Japan rise. It was an unnecessary rise but not caused by anything in Japan. It was caused by political leadership that came into office in the United States that had no clue of basic economics.

Rising fuel prices led to rising food prices (it costs more to get it to your table now) as well as overall transportation. What caused it? The new leadership (2020) in Washington DC decided that gas and oil companies in America were ‘evil’ and that they were going to do everything they could to make business life difficult for the American companies that currently fuel our lives. Therefore American oil production dropped and global supplies went down raising the costs of doing business even for us in Japan.

People are sometimes apathetic about voting. However this is a perfect example of how important it is to get competent people into political office.