Honda Executives Dish Out on Measured Electric Vehicle Plans at Rare Meeting

Toshihiro Mibe" width="970" height="647" data-caption='Honda president and CEO Toshihiro Mibe. <span class="media-credit">STR/JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images</span>'>

Last week, at a Honda Motor Co. event attended by Observer in Tochigi, Japan, the 76-year-old automaker outlined plans to offer seven new fully electric vehicles. While these will not be Honda’s first EVs, they will be the first built on the company’s in-house platform, Honda Zero. Japanese automakers (both Honda and Toyota) have been slow to roll out EVs compared with their American and Chinese counterparts as they take a wait-and-see approach to meeting the customer demand for new EV platforms. 

Two Honda concepts—the Saloon, a sleek, low sedan, and the Space Hub, a van-shaped vehicle—were unveiled at this year’s CES in January. At last week’s event, the company revealed a few more details of what might underpin these upcoming EVs. “We are creating a new value,” Toshihiro Mibe, the president and CEO of Honda, told a small group of journalists through an interpreter. “We are going back to the starting point to create a completely new platform, from zero.”

Toshihiro Akiwa, the head of battery EV development at Honda, also noted that most EVs on the market are heavy and thick and that the company is taking a new approach, including new manufacturing techniques, to achieve its goal of creating a thin, light and spacious EV with the “Man Maximum, Machine Minimum” (or M/M) concept at its core. 

Honda Zero is Honda’s first EV platform after its relationship with GM’s EV development faltered earlier this year. The only product out of the partnership is an EV called the Honda Prologue, built on GM’s Ultium platform. The original plan was for the two companies to co-develop a full line of affordable EVs. However, that plan was scrapped in late 2023, although GM and Honda still have agreements to work on hydrogen vehicles and other technology. Honda says it still has plans to offer a fully electric lineup by 2040, while GM is slow-walking (and rolling back) its EV plans to focus on profitability. 

Katsushi Inoue, the head of Electrification Business Development Operations at Honda, declined to discuss Honda’s current relationship with GM and how Honda applied what it had learned from the Prologue to the Zero platform.

Executives at the event emphasized that the first vehicle to be built on the Zero platform will be a halo vehicle, or a top-of-the-line vehicle with all the advanced tech that the company can pack into it. It will look very similar to the Saloon sedan concept shown at CES in 2024, but may get a new name.

While the partnership with GM was geared toward creating affordable EVs, Honda is now focusing on the higher end of the market. That’s no real surprise since it can take hundreds of millions to develop an all-new EV platform, and it’s standard practice for automakers to roll out their most advanced tech for their top-of-the-line vehicles first and let the technology trickle down to more affordable vehicles in the future. “Cost and technology make creating an affordable EV difficult,” Akiwa said via a translator. 

Gathered Honda executives also noted that the Chinese EV market is markedly different from North America for which Honda is developing the current Zero platform. EVs targeted for Chinese consumers, such as the Yè announced in April, share a common ethos with the Zero platform with a focus on the M/M concept, the executives said. Still, the actual technology and battery platform underpinning Honda’s Chinese EVs are different from the Zero platform.

When asked why Honda went with a ground-up redesign rather than, say, electrifying the popular Honda Civic, Takashi Onuma, the chief officer of Automobile Production Operations at Honda, said via an interpreter, “We are in a difficult era where the market is difficult to predict.” Mibe, the CEO, added that Honda’s belief is that the company needs to create new values around EVs rather than simply extend the current values of its ICE lineup. “Down the road, EV values will be very different from internal combustion values,” Mibe said. 

A production version of the Saloon will debut at CES in 2025, and Honda is expected to share more details about how it will get to the promised EPA range of 300 miles.