The Japanese Mitsubishi Motors is willing to sign an alliance between Honda Motor and Nissan Motor, according to the Nikkei newspaper.
The move will create a rapprochement between automakers with combined sales of more than 8 million vehicles, a Nikkei reported on Sunday.
Mitsubishi Motors, which is 34 percent owned through Nissan, will work with Honda and Nissan to finalize the main points of their strategic partnership, Nikkei said.
One of the goals of the 3 is to standardize the embedded software that controls cars.
The move comes as Nissan, Japan’s third-largest carmaker, has been wasting market share in its two biggest markets, the United States and China, which combined accounted for share of its global sales in the year ended in March.
Earlier this year, Nissan and Honda said they were a strategic partnership to collaborate on the production of electric vehicle parts and synthetic intelligence in automotive software platforms.
Mitsubishi Motors is already part of a long-standing alliance with Nissan and France’s Renault, which the three automakers agreed last year to restructure, with the aim of creating a smaller but more pragmatic and agile partnership.
A separate collaboration between Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi Motors could help Japanese automakers reduce prices and face headwinds in the NEV sector, ruled by corporations such as BYD and China’s Tesla.
In China, the world’s largest car market, Japanese brands used to be strong, but now they rank against domestic automakers that have won over tech-savvy consumers with their state-of-the-art vehicles.