Volvo plans to share truck battery technology with other brands to compete with tesla

Own battery technology to control the high development and production costs of key components. It comes as the world's second-largest truckmaker tries to ramp up research and development and production of electric trucks.

Volvo wants to share its battery technology with other brands, including UDTrucks in Japan, scania in Sweden and MackTrucks in the us, as carmakers face rising costs, low emissions and trends in autonomous driving.

"When it comes to component development and production, we want to be able to cut costs in some ways." LarsStenqvist, chief technology officer of Volvo group truck technology, told Reuters in an interview. "It's not just truck brands, it's going to include car brands and construction equipment in the future."

UDTrucks said it plans to introduce an all-electric version of its Quon heavy trucks around 2020. Volvo had already announced earlier this month that it would launch a mid-sized truck powered by lithium-ion batteries in Europe in 2019 for tasks such as urban transport and transporting rubbish.

"It's very difficult for us to do that without sharing technology and platforms." DouglasNakano, senior vice President at UDTrucks. "Technically, we're ready."

UDTrucks' Japanese rival, Daimler AG's MitsubishiFuso, began selling electric versions of its Canter trucks last year in Japan and the U.S. and began expanding into Europe earlier this year. Vw's truck division also said it plans to launch a mid-sized electric truck for the north American market by the end of 2019.

After upending the traditional auto industry, electric vehicle leader tesla has begun to branch out into the truck and heavy equipment industry. The company released Semi heavy electric trucks last year and plans to put them into production by 2019.

Volkswagen and Toyota's truck division said earlier this month that they had plans to form an alliance as more automakers look to use economies of scale to reduce development costs in order to stay competitive.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.