BYD and Hino Motors sign strategic business alliance for commercial EVs
BYD and Hino Motors have agreed a strategic business alliance to collaborate in the development of EVs for the commercial vehicle market.
Wang Jie, BYD vice president, says: “The cooperation between the Chinese and Japanese companies will benefit the development of commercial vehicle electrification by introducing leading technology and rich experience, which will accelerate the global adoption of pure electric commercial vehicles.”
Hino director and senior managing officer Taketo Nakane adds: “By bringing together BYD’s achievement in BEV development and Hino’s electrification technology and reliability built over years of experience in developing hybrid vehicles, we will develop the best-fit commercial BEV products for consumers in working towards swift market introduction”.
BYD started in 1995 as a battery R&D and manufacturing company and its commercial vehicle product lineup ranges from electric coaches and buses to electric trucks. Its first K9 pure electric bus emerged in Shenzhen in 2011,and BYD vehicles are now in more than 300 cities with more than 50,000 units in operation.
Hino was founded in 1942 and in 1991, it released the world’s first commercially available hybrid vehicle as a heavy-duty urban transit bus and has light-duty electric vehicle buses and medium-duty plug-in hybrid buses in operation.
Its latest heavy-duty truck has the newest 6th Generation Hybrid system which improves fuel efficiency by about 15 per cent.