The battery joint venture Toyota Motor Corp. and Panasonic Corp. aims to increase the efficiency of development and manufacturing processes by 10 times to better compete with larger Chinese competitors, its head said on Tuesday.
Prime Planet Energy & Solutions Inc is currently the world's largest supplier of hybrid vehicle batteries, but it only accounts for 3% of the high capacity EV battery market, well behind China's Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd with a share of more than 20%.
Prime Planet is moving towards standardizing battery designs and helping to streamline material supplier operations, its president, Hiroaki Koda, told a press conference.
"By increasing efficiency tenfold, we can beat the Chinese," added Koda.
Koda declined to name a timeframe for the performance target or the scale of subsequent cost reductions, but said the company is likely to improve five to six times the next version of its product it is currently working on.
When asked about Tesla Inc's TSLA.O promise to halve the cost of batteries over the next few years through new technologies and processes, Koda said Prime Planet has similar technology plans.
"Tesla has publicly announced this, so they'll do it," said Koda, a former head of purchasing at Toyota.
