Automotive

Bridgestone Corp. boasts the largest share of the global tire market. For this installment of Leaders, a column featuring corporate management and senior executives, The Yomiuri Shimbun asked Chairman and CEO Masaaki Tsuya about dealing with ongoing technological innovation in the automobile industry.

New automobile sales in October jumped 12.5 percent from a year earlier to 418,992 units, marking double-digit growth for the first time in 16 months, industry data showed Thursday.

Toyota Motor will next year launch a service that will allow customers to try various car models for a fixed monthly fee in Japan. The new offering is part of the company's efforts to explore new business opportunities that do not depend on new car sales alone.

Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai) unveiled to the media on Wednesday a new model of its Shinkansen bullet train during a test run of an eight-car length of the train at the company’s factory in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture.

It took more than seven years for automakers to sell 4 million passenger electric vehicles. It’ll take about six months to sell the next million.That surging demand is transforming the lithium-ion battery business, with more power packs expected to be installed in EVs this year than in consumer electronics, according to Bloomberg NEF. China, where subsidy-toting drivers own a third of the world’s passenger EVs, is doing the most to fuel the boom.

The only person in kimono at a recent government meeting on flying cars was Kotaro Chiba, a former online-game executive turned financier of a very specific kind.

Gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles are rapidly increasing their presence in the nation partly on the back of growing environmental awareness.

A Japanese team including Nagoya University said Thursday that they have jointly developed an autonomous car that responds to the voice and motion of the person in the driver’s seat.

Panasonic aims to offer various services with autonomous electric cars, including ferrying elderly people in depopulated areas, teaming with startups to dive into next-generation transport services as consumers shift toward using vehicles rather than owning them.