When we think of iconic Japanese cars, the influential models from the motherland spring to mind—the 1JZ A70 Supra, the R34 Skyline, the 2000GT. But after Japanese marques established a foothold in the States, some of their most interesting projects were built just for us. Take, for example, the earliest commercially viable electric cars produced by the Japanese Big Three. While forgotten today, this trio laid the groundwork for our modern era. These early EVs existed solely because of, and for, Americans.
California’s Mandate
In 1990, the California Air Resources Board passed its first zero-emissions vehicle (or “ZEV”) mandates. They applied to every large automaker selling cars in the state, and they were remarkably aggressive. The rules stated that by 1998, 2% of a car company’s total sales in California had to be zero-emission. By 2003, a staggering 10% of a carmaker’s vehicles sold in the state would need to be ZEVs. While last year, over a quarter of new cars sold in California were zero-emission, in 1990, 10% was unimaginable.
In 1990, the best-selling EV in American history was this: the Vanguard-Sebring CitiCar/Commuter Vehicles Comuta-Car, first introduced in 1974 in the deepest throes of the fuel crisis. It boasted 40 miles of range, a top speed of 40 miles per hour (headwind-limited), and anywhere from 2.5 to 6 horsepower. Power was supplied via a 48-volt array of lead-acid golf cart batteries. It cost $2,998 at its launch. By the time it finally died in the early Eighties, roughly 4,400 had been sold.
After Commuter Vehicles discontinued building its doorstop on wheels in 1982, basically no commercially successful attempts at an EV hit the market for the next decade. This put automakers in an intense bind. They had to develop zero-emissions vehicles essentially from scratch, and they had to do it fast or risk losing the massive and invaluable California car market entirely.
In 1990, Toyota, Nissan, and Honda all sold enough cars in California to meet the terms of the mandate. All three companies began work on EVs so as not to lose this valuable market.
By the time the 1998 deadline rolled around, manufacturers and the California state government realized that building tens of thousands of commercially feasible EVs in just eight years would be entirely impossible. The regulations were softened to require just a few hundred cars to be produced (the exact number would depend on exactly how many cars the manufacturer had sold in the state in previous years). Still, Toyota, Nissan, and Honda all needed to develop vehicles. The three companies came up with wildly innovative cars, all with a different spin on early EV technology.
Toyota’s Answer
Toyota was later to the EV rush than some of its contemporaries, not unlike today, with its research program starting late in 1992. The company hit the ground quickly, though, and developed a handful of lease-only Japanese market EV prototypes by 1993, including a lead-acid battery-powered Townace van and a Crown Majesta fleet sedan. Serious progress wouldn’t come until 1995, however, when the RAV4 EV initiative began.
Some early RAV4 EVs sported similar lead-acid battery technology that the Comuta-car—and every EV dating back to the dawn of the electric car—had used. Manufacturers, including Toyota, rapidly realized that lead-acid batteries simply would not cut it for mass-market cars. Lead-acid batteries degrade relatively rapidly when repeatedly run from full to zero charge, and they have a terrible energy density at just 35 watt-hours per kilogram.
For an idea of how poor this performance is, the 118.0-kilowatt-hour Lucid Air Grand Touring battery, if it were composed of lead-acid batteries, would weigh 7,431 pounds by itself. (It would also probably need its own travel trailer—lead-acid batteries are generally not compact.) As a result of this terrible energy density, electric cars in the 90s were facing what’s known to engineers as the tyranny of the rocket equation: to get more payload (or range), you have to add more fuel, which means more weight. That additional fuel weight necessitates more fuel. Eventually, you’re adding extra fuel just to launch the extra fuel.
To get more range out of EVs without sacrificing every modern convenience, a new power solution was required. In 1995, Toyota partnered with Panasonic to use their new nickel-metal hydride (or NiMH) batteries. These batteries, which were a relatively recent development, possessed twice the energy density of lead-acid batteries at roughly 70 watt-hours per kilogram, were lower maintenance, and required fewer toxic materials to build. Toyota began testing by putting a set in a limited-production, three-door RAV4 and entering it in the First Scandinavian Electric Car Rally, a 351-mile race from Göteborg, Sweden to Oslo, Norway. The RAV4 won.
After building roughly 100 three-door versions for Japan and Europe, the company fixed its sights on the California market in time for the 1998 mandate. The company built five-door, left-hand-drive RAV4 models with nickel-metal hydride batteries starting in 1997. These larger models had more storage space, as the batteries would fit entirely under the floor. They also featured all the creature comforts that American buyers expected—airbags, ABS, heated seats, air-conditioning, heating—and a slightly more powerful motor.
By modern standards, it was still a tame EV, with a top speed of just 78 miles an hour and an EPA-rated range of 95 miles, but it worked. These cars were first offered solely to public utilities and fleet buyers as leases—typical for the early EV era—in small quantities. Toyota produced 1,484 in total, making it the most widely produced of any EV of this era.
Unlike its Nissan and Honda contemporaries, however, Toyota offered the public the chance to buy the Toyota RAV4 EV in 2002. Toyota reported 328 sales—not shabby for an MSRP of $42,000, or roughly $75,000 in today’s dollars—and there are still RAV4 EVs on the road today. The NiMH battery technology was easily adapted to the Prius, where it was used in the first three generations of cars. It also was found underpinning one of its competitors.
Honda’s Answer
Honda’s initial strategy mirrored Toyota’s. Take a global-market gas vehicle, slap some lead-acid batteries and an electric motor into it, and go for a spin. The company’s first serious EV project began in 1990, and a team of roughly 100 engineers turned a Honda CR-X into an EV with off-the-shelf parts. The car made its maiden test run in mid-1991, but it was a letdown to Honda executives. Junichi Araki, project lead, was especially displeased; he reportedly said “You call this a car? What the heck did you just make?” The team re-oriented itself with the goal of building “the finest EV in the world”, and started from scratch.
Testing continued through the mid-90s in California and Japan with a variety of platforms, including a modified Wagovan and a fully rebodied Civic called the “CUV-4”. The CUV-4 was a more complete vehicle than the chopped-and-hacked CRX that preceded it, but it still used lead-acid batteries, and as a result, achieved a dismal 30 miles of maximum range in the heat of Southern California. Honda ultimately came to the same conclusion as Toyota: new technology was needed. Nickel-metal hydride batteries were sourced, and the lightly modified Civic platform was ditched in favor of a heavily modified Honda Logo design, the subcompact successor to the JDM Honda City.
Like the Toyota RAV4 EV, Honda kept focus on ensuring the new EV—christened the EV Plus—would retain all of the functionality of a traditional petroleum-powered machine. Air conditioning, heating, a stereo, power locks, and a full suite of safety features were standard. Honda also went the extra mile for the drivetrain, internally developing its own DC brushless motor. This was unusual for the era, as EVs were still so niche that off-the-shelf components were the only way to make them remotely economical. The decision did give the Honda EV Plus a notable boost over its competition: while it only had 66 horsepower, it made 203 pound-feet of torque. That was good enough for a sub-five-second 0-30 time, and gave it acceleration that felt much more like a modern neck-snapping EV than the Comuta-Cars that preceded it.
Manufacturing of the EV Plus began at the Takanezawa plant—Honda’s specialty vehicle factory where the NSX, Insight, and S2000 all hailed from—in early 1997. By late 1997, the EV Plus was in the hands of California fleet buyers (as leases). This timing meant the EV Plus was technically the first mass-produced, non-lead-acid-battery EV ever to be in buyers’ hands, as it beat the RAV4 EV to market by a handful of months.
The car was moderately successful, and a modified version was even entered in the 1999 Pikes Peak hillclimb, setting a new record for the electric car class. Despite these successes, Honda pulled the plug on the EV Plus program virtually the second it met its CARB requirements in 1999, with somewhere around 330 cars produced in total and 300 on Californian roads. Although the EV Plus had an advertised MSRP of around $53,000 (over $100,00 in 2024 dollars), none were ever actually offered for sale.
By the early 2000s, California had given up on its aggressive EV mandates after realizing companies simply couldn’t manufacture them in vast numbers—and at the prices—that would be needed to hit a whopping 10% of new car sales. When CARB abandoned EVs, so did Honda, and the EV Plus leases were ended and the cars returned to Honda. Only two cars are known to exist today, both in Honda museums—the rest were all destroyed.
There was one more Japanese EV of the era, however, even less well-publicized than either the EV Plus or the RAV4 EV, and it proved to be the most prescient.
Nissan's Answer
Nissan had the longest history of experimenting with electrification of any of the major Japanese OEMs, with its first production EV—the 1947 Tama E4S—developed in response to widespread oil and gas shortages in the wake of World War II. The E4S, first developed by the Tachikawa Aircraft Company (later the Tama Electric Car Company, then merged into Prince Motors, which would one day become Nissan) entered only limited manufacture as an urban taxi, but was the first of a handful of all-electric cars the company manufactured through the early 50s as fuel shortages continued.
Tama eventually stopped producing EVs as postwar Japan’s economy and supply chain recovered, but Nissan as a whole kept experimenting with EV technology in the coming decades. In 1973, the company debuted an all-electric cabover truck concept called the EV-4 that, while it never made production, boasted 180 miles of range, regenerative braking, and made it as far as crash testing. The company continued toying with the tech, building limited runs of an electrified Laurel sedan, an induction-motor powered March convertible, an Avenir cargo wagon, as well as other one-off models and concept cars.
The real breakthrough, however, came in 1996 with the Prairie Joy EV. The Prairie Joy EV was a simple conversion of a gas model (the Nissan Prairie minivan, sold briefly in America as the Axxess) like many of Nissan’s other attempts at electrification. However, this vehicle bore one significant difference: it was powered by lithium-ion batteries. Only thirty were built for Japanese fleet usage, but the initial results were strong: one of them did six years of service at the world’s northernmost permanent arctic settlement in Svalbard, Norway, proving the novel and unique lithium battery tech—which up until that point had only been used for small consumer electronics like phones and laptops—would last even in incredibly hostile conditions. Lithium also represented a massive leap in potential performance over NiMH batteries, as although they were expensive and required rare materials, the energy density could potentially reach three times that of NiMH.
With proven tech in hand, Nissan moved on to meeting the CARB requirements. The base vehicle would be the R’nessa minivan, a gas-powered car from the Japanese market. This new EV, known as the Altra, preserved modern functionality like keyless entry, heat and air conditioning, and power windows, and boasting a DC permanent magnet motor under the hood. The Altra EV also produced an impressive 83 horsepower, the most of any Japanese EV of its era.
For power, Sony produced car-sized battery packs specially for Nissan’s EV project, assembling 96 individual cells into a 345v, 32.4-kWh unit. The pack wasn’t light for its output, at over 800 pounds, but the Altra EV boasted the longest range of any EV on the market at the time of its introduction, at an EPA-rated 90 miles (the GM EV1, when it was released with a NiMH pack in 1999, did manage to best this with 105 miles of range—but it was built specifically to be an EV). Additionally, the lithium-ion pack was projected to last ten years of driving before needing replacement, years longer than a lead-acid battery could last (and seven years longer than Honda projected the NiMH EV Plus battery would survive).
The lithium packs were wildly expensive: insider sources in the era estimated each battery cost Nissan $50,000-70,000 in 1997, more than the MSRP of $50,999. Like the Honda EV Plus, however, buying an Altra EV was a purely hypothetical exercise. None were ever sold to private customers; they were only used by Nissan employees and corporate lease customers. Around 200 were produced in total until the Altra was canned in 2002. Like the Honda EV Plus, when the remaining leases ended, the cars were rounded up and largely destroyed. As I researched this story, I could only confirm the existence of two Altras left on this Earth.
What Did We Learn?
Obviously, repealing those CARB laws paused the development of EVs, as it was no longer required and the economies of scale simply didn’t allow their existence. The largest roadblocks in this era stemmed from a lack of battery development. NiMH, despite being a vast improvement over ancient lead-acid technology, suffered poor performance in extreme temperatures, high weight, and high pack costs.
Additionally, the specific battery design used by Toyota—which stuck with EVs the longest after the end of the CARB mandate—had its patent purchased by Texaco, which sued aggressively to stop further development. NiMH as an EV battery was dead in its tracks, although it still got mainstream usage in Honda’s Insight and Toyota’s Prius hybrids for years to come.
Still, lessons were learned. Motor tech advanced rapidly during this era. The dominant 400V standard for vehicle architecture was developed and standardized. J1772 charging—the standard for Level 2 for most companies until the past year—was developed from lessons learned from this era’s cars. Most importantly, lithium development continued, and currently underpins every major EV currently on the market. Nissan continued work on electric cars through the 2000s, and in 2009, the Nissan Leaf debuted as a purchasable mass-produced EV. It easily earned and retained the all-time electric vehicle sales crown until 2020, when Tesla finally surpassed it.
These forgotten cars laid the groundwork for the current era of electrification. Plus, they’re just cool—It can be easy to forget that EVs, now so ubiquitous, were once alien feats of electrical and automotive engineering. These cars offer a glimpse into an era of ingenuity that built the world we live in today.
