If you’re a major automotive manufacturer, it’s pretty much mandatory that you be working on some kind of electric vehicle development right now, especially if you do a lot of business in China.
That’s certainly the position in which Toyota finds itself, so it’s had to go out, beat the bushes and find itself a sizable Chinese EV battery provider — which it did in the form of CATL, according to an announcement made by Toyota on Wednesday.
If CATL sounds familiar, it’s because it’s also working with Volvo to provide batteries for that brand and its Polestar subsidiary. CATL is also working with Honda and was in talks with Tesla for a while to provide cells for Gigafactory Shanghai, though that ended up not working out.
“To further promote the widespread use of electrified vehicles, CATL and Toyota agree that a stable supply of batteries is critical and that battery technology must be further developed and advanced,” Toyota representatives said in a statement.
Stable is the key word there. Batteries are a volatile business, especially considering the vast amounts of relatively rare and expensive minerals they require. Thankfully for companies like CATL, many of those minerals are being mined inside China’s borders, but other firms elsewhere in the world haven’t been so fortunate.
This news of Toyota’s battery partnership comes hot on the heels of its announcement that it plans to offer an electrified version of every single Lexus model by 2025 as well as receiving half of its revenue from the sale of electrified vehicles by 2025.
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