General engines
On Tuesday, General Motors and Honda announced that the two companies are collaborating on a new line of affordable electric vehicles. The two OEMs will develop a new architecture that leverages GM’s new Ultium battery platform for North America, South America and China. Production of the first vehicles from both manufacturers should begin in 2027.
Honda and GM have been growing together for a while. In 2017 they formed a joint venture to mass-produce hydrogen fuel cells, and the following year they partnered in autonomous driving technology through Cruise and in the development of next-generation batteries.
In 2020, the two companies announced that Honda would design two new EVs for North America using GM’s Ultium batteries. Those two EVs are still in development, as is Honda’s EV partnership with Sony — this announcement comes on top of those plans.
“The progress we’ve made with GM since announcing the EV battery development partnership in 2018, followed by the joint development of electric vehicles, including the Honda Prologue, has demonstrated the win-win relationship that brings new value can create for our customers,” he said. Shinji Aoyama, Honda’s senior general manager. “This new range of affordable EVs will build on this relationship by leveraging our strengths in developing and manufacturing high-performance vehicles in the compact class.”
GM and Honda want to design a new flexible architecture (such as the Volkswagen Group EIA), specifically for affordable cars such as compact crossovers. But both say affordability will come through scale and combined purchasing as well as design.
The partnership is still in its infancy, with five years before the first cars find customers, so it’s too early for both companies to go into details on exact production numbers.
Honda did say it wants to “develop a range of EVs in the most popular high-quality, high-volume segments” and that price parity with internal combustion engine offerings is the goal.
GM is becoming less and less tight-lipped as it has unveiled an EV in the US market that will be a crossover smaller and cheaper than next year’s $30,000 Equinox EV. “Our partnership with Honda and the continued development of Ultium are the foundation of this project, leveraging our global scale to enable a lower cost base for this new line of EVs for millions of customers,” said Doug Parks, GM executive vice president, Global Product Development, Procurement and Supply Chain.
