On the morning of March 30, 2021, Choi Won-seok, a reporter from Chosun Ilbo, released an exclusive report that the cooperation between Tesla and Toyota is getting closer.
Choi, the reporter of Chosun Ilbo, said that this information was revealed by an official in Japan who is related to the automotive industry on the 28th. According to the official, discussions on the re-collaboration between Tesla and Toyota began last year.
Toyota and Tesla used to collaborate, with the latter providing electric drive systems to Toyota’s RAV4 model. However, this cooperation terminated in 2014 and Toyota sold its stake in Tesla in 2017. One of the reasons for the cooperation was that Toyota had to deal with CARB environmental regulations in California. It is said that the friendship between Toyota’s Akio Toyoda and Elon Musk did not end after the collaboration was terminated, which provided a certain space for this suspected renewed cooperation.
According to the report, the way of cooperation this time is that Toyota will provide a vehicle platform to Tesla, and in return, Tesla will provide individual electronic control system platforms and software technology on its own vehicles. It is suspected that Tesla will be able to get a ready-made vehicle platform to reduce R&D expenses, and produce and sell small SUVs. Toyota can also gain Tesla’s ECU and OS design experience.
Toyota, as the world’s largest automaker with annual sales of nearly 9.53 million vehicles in 2020, could give its vehicles the option of installing Tesla’s autonomous driving system. This will give great product highlights to the global market and also exponentially increase the amount of data Tesla can obtain, accelerating the development process of autonomous driving.
Toyota, with the consortium MONET established in Japan with SoftBank and other companies, aims to promote MaaS (Mobility as a Service) nationwide, and autonomous driving capability is the core driving force in opening up this market. Similarly, Tesla is so keen on autonomous driving because Robotaxi (unmanned taxi) is another place to attract hot money after electrification. Being a platform-based enterprise, operational efficiency is crucial, and vehicle quality is one of the factors. Toyota, with its huge production scale, will also bring valuable experience in vehicle quality control to Tesla.
🔗Source: Naver
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.