According to Bloomberg News, when Toshihiro Mibe took responsibility as chief executive officer of Honda Motor Co last year, he promised to fulfill carbon neutrality by 2050. He also said that he would phase out the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2040 to become the first automaker in Japan to make such a statement.
The aim is to go fully-electric
Presently, he is backing up the statement with numbers. He said that Honda would be spending 5 trillion yen, equivalent to $40 billion. At the same time, it ventures into the electric vehicle arena in the next decade to introduce as many as 30 electric vehicle models by 2030, with the production volume to exceed 2 million vehicles annually.
While talking to Bloomberg, he said that they can no longer assess the future just by drawing a straight line forward from today’s auto business.
However, even if it is electrification, it has its hurdles that Honda alone will not be able to overcome. For this reason, Mibe, who was running earlier the automaker’s research division before he became the CEO, has changed his stance when it comes to making electric vehicles and has abandoned the company’s “ go-alit-alone strategy” when it comes to manufacturing and selling the electric vehicles.
Last month there was an announcement from Honda that it is joining forces with Sony Group Corp, the tech giant so that it can develop electric vehicles and sell them starting in 2025. And at the beginning of this month, Honda and General Motors Co. went on to further expand their prevailing association with plans to develop together with the electric vehicles in the prominent markets globally.
Bloomberg News reports that GM and Honda announced that they will introduce the first model, the starting price of which will be lower than $30,000 in 2027 in North America. Together with GM, Honda aims to bring the cost of the electric vehicles down to the extent that they are equivalent to price parity with the gasoline-powered vehicles, per the Japanese automaker.
Honda aims to expand partnerships further to stay abreast of what Mibe is seeing as constantly evolving battery and EV technologies.
Bloomberg News reports that Honda will begin trial production of the solid-state batteries towards the beginning of 2024, aside from its discussion with GM related to the next generation batteries, stated Mibe.
According to Mibe, a benefit that Honda enjoys by entering into a partnership with Sony and GM is that capital ties do not exist between the companies that could have posed to impose restrictions with their actions.
