Honda has officially announced that it wants to stop selling internal combustion-engined vehicles after the year 2040, in a bid to align itself with what other major automakers say they are doing. The end goal is to offer a more environmentally-friendly lineup of cars and eventually become carbon-neutral, although achieving that goal is still years, possibly decades away - Ford doesn’t expect to get there until at least 2050, for instance.
Unlike Toyota, which won’t make pure-electric cars unless it is forced to, Honda seems more willing to make commit to fully making the shift to electric. The latter even signed an agreement with General Motors to use the American auto giant’s Ultium batteries in its cars - both Honda- and Acura-badged models are expected to arrive for the 2024 model year, both of which will be larger vehicles; it currently only makes the fully-electric e, pictured in the gallery below, and it isn't available in America.
Gallery: 2020 Honda e
Automotive News quotes Yachiyo Tanaka, who is an analyst for Fourin, an automotive research company, as saying about Honda’s plan to become electric that
It's a very bold target. Honda has pledged to pull ahead of other automakers by introducing the latest technologies.
Still, the goal of making only electric cars as soon as possible is also backed up by other analyst predictions that expect the number of EVs sold around the world in one year will increase from 2020’s 3.1-million to over 14-million by 2025. Automakers will obviously want a slice of that growing global EV pie if they believe it will be profitable for them.
Honda is no exception, and the announcement may, as the source article points out, be an attempt to gain favor with shareholders, who want to hear the company’s plans detailing how it will become a fully-electric automaker. Even so, there will still be those people enamored with Honda’s excellent high-revving gasoline engines who will oppose the trend, and there will surely be those within the company who will also not be completely on-board.
Here are two future electric Honda ideas
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Source: Automotive News