Hino Motors, a Japanese car manufacturer that mainly focuses on the production of trucks and buses, has partnered with the Chinese BYD. The goal: to develop fully electric commercial vehicles.
Hino Motors and BYD Commercial Vehicles will form an alliance to work on new all-electric commercial vehicles. Both companies announce this in a joint statement. Japan’s Hino Motors has been around since 1942 and is largely owned by Toyota. It currently mainly builds large tour and city buses and trucks. Among others, the Hino 155 series shown above has been available for years with a hybrid powertrain. After all, Hino has been developing and applying partly electric drivelines for many years. Now it is the intention that together with BYD the step is taken to fully electric mobility.
BYD is an excellent partner in this respect, because the Chinese company is taking major steps in the field of electric vehicles. Among other things, its passenger car branch, which should eventually give us the Tang and the Han here in Europe, has achieved enormous successes in its home country of China with PHEVs and BEVs. In China, too, gigantic numbers of BYD fully electric vans and trucks are already driving around. In the Netherlands we already know BYD from electric city buses (photo 3). Hino Motors, in turn, is busy developing a modular platform for fully electric commercial vehicles and supplies its commercial vehicles and buses in Asia and the Americas, but also in Israel, Russia and Ireland, among others.