Japan – Last year, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha announced their joint effort to develop electric motorcycles. Recently, Honda released on its official website the latest progress of the joint effort. The four brands will work together to develop unified standards for key battery and charging indicators. It is certain that once the relevant standards are finalized, they will be the future global standards.

The move is part of the Japanese brands’ attempt to cut costs, drive mass production and become a global benchmark. At present, electric motorcycle manufacturers around the world use various adapters and batteries of different capacity. Through this cooperation, the four Japanese enterprises can reduce costs and may form the mainstream specifications of electric motorcycles to ultimately become the global standards.

The four brands will conduct large-scale tests of electric motorcycles in major Japanese cities to determine the convenience and problems of exchanging batteries as well as the final battery specifications. They will also consider aligning costs with the economic scale.