> bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute
If we put aside 5 hour commute, this describes central Tokyo, not bumfuck nowhere. Bumfuck nowhere has land for offgrid solar and therefore free home charging.
If the city you're in offers free roadside parking with L1 or L2 charging on light poles, good for you, but Tokyo and Japan at large isn't like that at all(unattended roadside parking is banned nationwide and robotic garages are everywhere).
If you're in the city a car shouldn't even be a major consideration (ideally).
Yeah, so few households that still own a car but don't use for commute choose cheaper ICEs that require no attention during weekdays. Then company cars driven weekdays when necessary remain ICE for familiarity as well as various EV chicken and egg problems.
There is no electricity in Tokyo?
The canonical American setup of a house with a garage where you can charge your car is exceedingly rare in Tokyo. Most people live in apartments and don't have cars, and even suburbam houses rarely have garages. If they have cars, they're parked in the apartment garage or a monthly contract parking lot, neither of which has charging.
It's a solvable chicken and egg problem, and China cracked it, but for time being Japan is way behind the curve in EV adoption.
Robotic parking but not charging as part of it seems odd.
That's true for majority of cases, but a small percentage of Tokyo that needs to visit places taxis and trains don't go is still a large number.
Thinking 10 years down the road, will autonomous rentals be geo-fenced and not suitable for multi-day trips to rural places?
A car should always be a major consideration for someone's needs. Especially if you have a family with young children or are disabled. Discounting cars as useless because mass transit exists is a terrible idea.
Unless you live in a city that has mass transit that actually works.
It’s not some Japan-only technology. You see them in New York City too.
You park your car in a stall, get out of your car, and then the stall closes and it moves a platform under your car and stores it someplace. You punch in your claim number, pay your parking fee, and then it gets your car and puts it back in the stall.
They're in places other than Tokyo as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6blks7vfZog
One was featured in the old Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift movie. That was probably the first time I had seen one, about 20 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHAkCLk6wP8
Way back there was a news story about one of those, in which the owner didn't pay the licence fee for the software, so the software company bricked their parking garage with loads of people's cars inside.
City of Hoboken, NJ. Plenty of more recent stories about Hoboken using robots, so I guess it didn't put them off.
Oh yeah, here it is: https://m.slashdot.org/story/70742
(Edited to add: that account is disputed, in some accounts the city stopped maintainers working on it without realising it wouldn't keep working)
That's crazy awesome... I wish I'd had use for one where I live just to test it out LOL
20 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHAkCLk6wP8
https://roboticparking.com/how-it-works/
...as one example.
Unlike bumfuck nowhere, Tokyo offers decent public transportation. Right?
Tokyo has a similar car ownership as Amsterdam - 0.4 per household.
About 75% of houses in Amsterdam own zero cars, and thus most of the rest have two.