Another Japanese automaker, Mitsubishi, is joining the Honda-Nissan collaboration that was first announced in March.
The three have agreed to meet and explore how to effectively collaborate on software and electric vehicles through a memorandum of understanding.
Following a hundred days of negotiations, the company officials displayed a sense of urgency. In recent decades, Japanese manufacturers controlled the gasoline engine market, but they are now trailing powerful new competitors in the green car space, such as China’s BYD and the United States’ Tesla.
According to their joint statement, Nissan and Honda plan to finish the fundamental research into the technologies for the next-generation software platform in around a year.
The two parties will benefit from their software collaboration as the capacity for data processing and the number of engineers in the region increase, thereby enhancing competitiveness, according to Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe.
“Through collaboration among the three companies, we expect the partnership to evolve into something that creates greater value, and to deliver unique products and services from each company that meet the diverse needs of customers,” Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida said in a statement.
Experts claimed that the growing popularity of EVs in China makes the alliance’s expansion logical.
To speed up development and realise economies of scale, the three companies are collaborating rather than working alone, which would require a lot of time and money.
Due to China’s much lower prices and a wider variety of electric automobiles, Honda, Nissan, and Mitsubishi will face more and more competition.
Every business would keep creating and providing its line of models.
However, Mibe and Uchida told reporters that they will pool resources in fields like software development and components, where “making friends” will be advantageous.
While acknowledging that it wasn’t ruled out, they declined to specify whether the friendship would extend to shared capital ownership.
The two businesses also decided that their model portfolios, which include both EVs and internal combustion engine vehicles, will “mutually complement” one another in a variety of international markets.
The corporations claimed that details are still being worked out.
We earlier reported that Toyota will collaborate with Tencent, the dominant player in Chinese gaming and social media.