Toyota and Tesla, who’re two of the biggest automakers across the globe have ended their long-standing partnership. Bloomberg has reported that Toyota has steadily been offloading its stake in the electric automaker and has now completely dumped its stock holding in Tesla by the end of last year.
The Japanese automaker had picked up a 3 percent stake in the California-based electric vehicle maker for $50 million earlier in 2010 when Tesla was still new to the game. Toyota previously planned that it will be building an electric vehicle in partnership with the Elon Musk-backed company and kicked off a project with the same. It even sold off its disused facilities in California to Tesla as part of the transaction, for around $42 million.
Under this partnership, both the automakers collaborated to jointly develop the RAV4 electric vehicles, whose production begun in 2011 in Canada. Toyota had then asserted that they were thoroughly impressed with “Tesla’s start-up culture,” its charismatic CEO Elon Musk and had termed the collaboration as a “historic” step for the company.
This resulted in false hopes for the Japanese automotive giant because while Tesla was performing exceptionally well and gaining importance in the automobile industry, Toyota was flailing on the said front. It was only able to sell about 2,500 vehicles of the lot they developed together.
Thus, it may have finally pushed the company to sell off the remaining stake in the electric automaker, which stood at around 1.43 percent, according to Toyota’s periodic financial review process. Back in 2014, Toyota sold off a portion of its stake in Tesla. Toyota spokesman Ryo Sakai has confirmed the development saying that the partnership is off for the moment, since they no longer hold a stake in the company.
Confirming the development, Toyota spokesman Ryo Sakai continued to mention:
Our development partnership with Tesla ended a while ago, and since there have not been any new developments on that front, we decided it was time to sell the remaining stake.
The company decided to form its own electric vehicle development facilities towards the end of 2016. It is now looking to launch and normalize long-range electric vehicle by the end of 2020. That’s not all. Toyota is also looking to build flying cars that it thinks could be used to light up the flame at 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Whereas Tesla is completely focused at launching its mass-production elecric vehicle, Model 3, by Summer later this year.
