Business
Honda Planning To Launch A New EV Brand In China Next Year
October 13, 2021
April 13, 2022
In a statement Tuesday, the company said approximately 3.5 trillion yen would go toward research and development expenses, with 1.5 trillion yen focused on investments.
When it comes to production, Honda said it would look to set up what it called a “dedicated EV plant” in the Chinese cities of Guangzhou and Wuhan. The firm said it was also “planning for a dedicated EV production line” in North America.
On the battery front in North America, the company is to “procure Ultium batteries from GM. Separately, aside from GM, Honda is exploring the possibility of creating a joint venture company for battery production.”
Just last week, Honda and GM announced they would develop a series of affordable electric vehicles based on a new global platform.
Everyone on the bandwagon
With several major economies looking to cut the number of diesel and gasoline vehicles on their roads in the years ahead, Honda and other carmakers are attempting to develop electrification strategies to enable them to keep up with new regulations and remain competitive.
In March 2021, Volvo Cars said it planned to become a “fully electric car company” by the year 2030.
Elsewhere, BMW Group has said it wants fully electric vehicles to represent at least 50% of its deliveries by 2030.
Such targets will put these companies in competition with Elon Musk’s Tesla, which produced more than 305,000 vehicles in the first quarter of 2022.
Another carmaker with plans for electrification is Mercedes-Benz, which has previously said it “will be ready to go all-electric at the end of the decade, where market conditions allow.”
On Monday, the firm held an ESG conference for analysts and investors. Among other things, it said it wanted to cover over 70% of its energy needs with renewables by 2030.
It would achieve this, it said, by “rolling out solar and wind power” at its own sites as well as entering into more power purchase agreements.
In an interview Ola Kallenius, chairman of the board of management at Mercedes-Benz Group, laid out some of the thinking behind his company’s strategy. “The good thing with investing in renewables, especially renewables in areas that have a high yield, is that if you look at the cent per kilowatt-hour once you are up and running, many of those options are actually less expensive than fossil-based energy,” he said.
Investing in renewables, Kallenius added, was “good business.”
