‘Panasonic and Toyota start joint venture for batteries of electric cars’

Panasonic and Toyota will form a joint venture next year to develop new generations of batteries for electric vehicles, according to the Japanese newspaper Nikkei. They would like to significantly reduce battery production costs.

Toyota would have a 51 percent stake in the joint venture, Panasonic the remaining 49 percent. The announcement would follow this week, Nikkei writes. Perhaps more details will follow about the techniques that the companies want to use. Panasonic’s current production facilities in China and Japan would come under the new company, but those in the US would not. For that factory, Panasonic is working with Tesla.

The intention is to start mass production of high-capacity batteries early next year, in order to reduce production costs. Nikkei is talking about ‘fifty times’ today’s production capacity for batteries used in hybrids. Not only Toyota and subsidiaries Daihatsu and Subaru have to purchase the batteries, but also Mazda and Honda.

Panasonic and Toyota have been working together on batteries for electric vehicles for some time. They are investigating, among other things, solid-state batteries and flat batteries with prismatic cells for electric vehicles as part of the current collaboration.

Update, 09.40: Initially this message stated that the joint venture wants to increase the capacity of batteries, but it is about production capacity.