Panasonic Holdings Corporation and Marubeni Corporation will establish a joint venture for the purpose of providing fleet management services for commercial electric vehicles. Panasonic HD and Marubeni aim to provide integrated support for the introduction and operations of EVs to large fleet operators.

While the adoption of EVs is gaining traction globally, there are limited numbers of use cases involving large EV fleets in Japan. Establishing economic rationality and operations unique to EVs is a prerequisite to the introduction of EVs for businesses operators of commercial vehicles, the partners said.

To introduce and operate many commercial EVs, important issues that must be considered include charging infrastructure, charging operations, monitoring of on-board batteries, and establishment of vehicle maintenance systems.

The JV will provide various solutions, from identifying issues to realizing efficient operations by EVs, when fleet operators introduce commercial EVs. The issues identified and solutions proposed will be tailored to the fleet operators through providing trial EV operations and environments for these operations, alongside charging management and on-board battery monitoring systems for efficient operation of multibrand chargers and EVs.

In the future, the JV additionally aims to establish a circular economy model with a view to secondary use of EV and batteries.

Moving forward, the JV will accelerate the adoption of commercial EVs by utilizing Panasonic Group's know-how and technologies related to batteries in tandem with Marubeni’s business resources in the fields of mobility and EVs.