The Japanese car company Mitsubishi Motors will join the alliance of two other major car manufacturers - Honda and Nissan, newspaper Nikkei citing his sources.
The combined production volume of the three companies is about 8 million vehicles per year, which will make the alliance the second largest player in the Japanese market after Toyota Motor, which also forms an alliance with Daihatsu, Suzuki, Subaru, Mazda and Hino Motors. whose total sales volume reaches 16 million units per year.
Details of the agreement, which will allow Mitsubishi, Honda and Nissan to “survive in a highly competitive market”, as the paper says, are still being worked out. Company representatives are expected to discuss the standardization of car software. The parties will also discuss the complementarity of product lines. For example, Honda does not produce plug-in hybrids (PHVs) or pickups in Japan, while Mitsubishi has a strong position in this niche.
The cooperation between these three auto corporations is intensifying amid the global auto industry's transition to electric vehicles, in which Japanese companies are lagging behind rivals from other countries. Thus, in 2023, Nissan and Honda sold only 140,000 and 19,000 electric cars, respectively, while Tesla and China's BYD sold 1.8 million and 1.57 million, the publication notes.