OSAKA -- Japan's Espec will double its in-house testing equipment for electric-vehicle batteries, anticipating higher demand for its services from manufacturers as the government looks to promote domestic production.
The testing gear supplier will spend 800 million yen ($5.4 million) to expand to around 80 units by next year. The equipment measures the performance of batteries through repeated cycles of charging and discharging -- which typically degrades the capacity of the lithium-ion batteries that EVs mainly use -- and detects any abnormalities.
