Toyota and Panasonic will establish a joint venture set to develop and produce electric vehicle batteries from April.
The company, dubbed Prime Planet Energy & Solutions, is set to develop prismatic batteries that will be made available to other car manufacturers. Toyota owns 51 per cent of the joint venture while Panasonic owns the rest.
Operations will kick off on April 1, 2020 with approximately 5,100 employees, including 2,400 at a subsidiary in China. The joint venture will have offices in Tokyo and in the Kansai region of Japan.
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“The joint venture announced by Toyota and Panasonic will develop highly competitive, cost-effective batteries that are safe and feature excellent quality and performance (in terms of capacity, output, durability, etc.), enabling use with peace of mind by all customers,” the companies wrote in a press release. “Batteries – as solutions for providing energy for automobiles and various other forms of mobility, and as solutions for various kinds of environmental issues – are expected to fulfill a central role in society going forward.”
This is far from Panasonic’s first foray into the manufacturing of electric vehicle batteries as it already supplies cylindrical batteries to Tesla and has been stepping up its development of the prismatic batteries that are more commonly found within the automotive industry.
Toyota and Panasonic have also worked together extensively in the past and actually first started joint battery research in 1996 when they established a joint venture for hybrid car batteries, Reuters reports.
