A new 3-company automotive alliance could be in the works between Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi.
“Collaboration” and “partnership” are words we’ve seen tossed around a lot over the past few years, especially as automakers grapple with the immensely expensive task of developing electrified cars. To that end, Honda and Nissan announced they were considering a tie-up earlier this year, aimed squarely at “vehicle electrification and intelligence” — in other words, sharing EV components, platforms and software. Now, according to a report from Nikkei Asia, Mitsubishi is looking to get into the prospective Honda-Nissan alliance.
Nissan currently holds a 34% stake in Mitsubishi, though no decision came back in March as to what to do within the framework of this new strategic partnership. Now, as Nikkei cites “the rise of emerging powers” within the EV space, namely Tesla in the US and BYD (among others) in China, Japanese automakers are trying to bolster their efforts to compete in the EV space in terms of accelerating R&D and locking down supply chains to ramp up actual production as they plan to bring dozens of new vehicles to market in the coming years.
Just on its own, Nissan announced a plan in March to bring out 30 new vehicles in the next two years alone. A larger partnership with Honda and Mitsubishi could see even more new vehicles come to market, with several potentially sharing a platform and other components across the alliance. The report notes that Mitsubishi signed a nondisclosure agreement within the past several months, with the ambition of working within the strategic partnership to “enhance their competitiveness in order to survive in the highly competitive market.”
It’s not just American and Chinese carmakers the three need to worry about, either. As collaboration and consolidation become the name of the game, the three automakers in this potential Honda-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance have to worry about Japan’s largest automaker: Toyota. In fact, Toyota itself signed onto several tie-ups with other Japanese companies over the past several years, including Subaru, Mazda and Suzuki, while it has controlling interests in Daihatsu and truck maker Hino Motors. Combined, that conglomerate manages a combined sales volume of 16 million vehicles annually, compared to the potential Honda-Nissan-Mitsubishi group’s 8.35 million combined sales (as of the fiscal year ending in March 2024).
This prospective strategic partnership would effectively split the Japanese car industry into two major chunks: a Toyota-led group on one side, and this three-company alliance on the other.
On the EV front, Nissan and Honda sold a combined 160,000 units worldwide. Compare that with Tesla and BYD’s 1.8 million and 1.6 million, respectively, and the picture of this tie-up gets much clearer. In addition to fully electric cars, though, the companies will play on each other’s strengths, such as Mitsubishi’s plug-in hybrid vehicles. The three will also work to standardize jointly-developed software among vehicles in the group, which will naturally extend to new Mitsubishi models sometime in the next several years, if this partnership comes to fruition.
Per Reuters, Mitsubishi shares rose more than 6% in early afternoon trading on news of the potential three-company partnership. Nissan and Honda, for their part, each rose by more than 2%.
