Japanese car firm Mazda has announced it intends to spend 1.5 trillion yen ($10.6 billion) on electrifying its vehicles and potentially investing in battery production, primarily to be spent on research and development. It plans to introduce new battery electric vehicles between 2025 and 2027, and it will properly ramp up EV production between 2028 and 2030, at which point it expects EVs to make up 40% of the company’s sales. So far the company, much like others within Japan, has been slow in accepting that it will have to produce EVs if it wants to survive. It was only within the last couple of months that rumors began circulating of Toyota abandoning its e-TNGA assembly base, in what amounted…