Japanese automakers Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors have signed a memorandum of understanding for a “strategic partnership” in electric vehicles to address common challenges in the field, the three groups announced Thursday.
“Collaboration with partners is essential in today’s automotive industry, which is experiencing rapid changes due to technological innovations such as electrification,” Mitsubishi Motors President Takao Kato said in a joint statement.
Honda and Nissan, Japan’s second and third largest automakers behind Toyota, announced in March that they were exploring prospects for collaboration on automotive software platforms, key components for electric vehicles and other complementary products.
“The automobile industry is in a period of transformation that only happens once in a century,” Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe said Thursday, also quoted in the statement.
“We hope that the combination of technologies and knowledge cultivated by Nissan and Honda, together with the strength and experience of Mitsubishi Motors, will enable us to more quickly solve the various problems related to electrification” on a global scale, he added.
Common difficulties in China
Japanese manufacturers are looking to quickly strengthen their position in the electric market, a market whose global take-off in recent years, especially in China and Europe, has outpaced the entire Japanese automobile industry.
“China is the world’s largest auto market, but it is also one of the most competitive, with strong domestic brands and strict regulations favoring electric vehicles,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Tatsuo Yoshida told AFP.
Sales of Nissan and Honda have fallen sharply in China after some of their factories closed there, while Mitsubishi Motors last year decided not to continue producing in the country.
In Japan too, even if the electric wave is weaker there than elsewhere, the automobile market, historically dominated by Japanese brands, is now shaken by the American Tesla, the arrival of the Chinese electric champion BYD and the return of the South Korean Hyundai, also with electrified vehicles.
Honda and Nissan are considering pooling their resources on electric batteries and have already agreed to “harmonize specifications” so that the batteries “can be used in the vehicles of both companies,” they announced in a separate statement.
They also want to explore synergies in software, “including autonomous driving, connectivity and AI, which will determine the value of vehicles in the future and become a source of competitiveness,” they say.
Such alliances between manufacturers “can offer several strategic advantages in areas such as sharing of research and development costs and labor, economies of scale and market penetration,” Yoshida said.
However, “while these collaborations can deliver significant benefits, their success will depend on effective integration and execution.”