TO ELECTRIFY, SUBARU LEANS ON ITS FRIENDS

Subaru’s dive into electrification this year with the U.S. launch of a plug-in hybrid, and its offering of a full electric vehicle in 2021, will rely on the help of its friends — one old and several new.

The old friend is Toyota Motor Corp. The new ones are Mazda, Suzuki, Daihatsu and Hino.

Subaru has an in-house electrification project. But it is also drawing heavily from partnerships to engineer the upcoming plug-in hybrid and EV, said the automaker’s chief technical officer, Takeshi Tachimori. Subaru’s plug-in hybrid will pull largely from the Toyota Prius Prime’s system.

“For our plug-in hybrid to be introduced this year, we have used Toyota’s technologies as much as possible,” Tachimori said.

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