According to the authoritative Japanese news media "Yomiuri Shimbun", several Executives of Honda Automobile revealed that the company has announced a new battery procurement plan internally.
Honda aims to fully electrify its vehicles by 2040. In order to achieve this goal, at this stage it is necessary to obtain a large number of batteries at low cost. In the longer term, Honda will also accelerate the development of its own next-generation all-solid-state batteries to achieve longer ranges.
At present, the mainstream lithium-ion batteries are heavier, easy to catch fire, and the transportation cost is high. In order to reduce costs, Honda plans to make spare parts available nearby at each production site, and its three major markets (Japan, the United States and China) will purchase batteries from different Chinese and Korean companies. Several Honda executives said the company would announce the plan in February.
(Source: Yomiuri Shimbun)
In China, the world's largest automotive market, Honda chose to purchase in-vehicle batteries mainly from CATL. CATL is the company with the largest global battery market share, and according to market research firm SNE Research, CATL's production capacity reached 67.1 GWh between January and November last year, accounting for 29% of the global market share.
Honda plans to launch 10 electric vehicles by the end of 2026, and its joint venture in China, Dongfeng Honda, announced that the new energy plant project will be located in Wuhan. It is reported that the project is Honda's first new energy benchmarking plant in the world, located in the Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone, covering an area of 630,000 square meters, and is scheduled to be officially put into operation in 2024, with a basic annual production capacity of 120,000 vehicles in the early stage.
In Japan, Honda will purchase mainly from the Ibaraki Prefecture plant of Envision ASEC, a large Chinese-owned vehicle battery company. Although Japan's Panasonic company ranks third in the world in terms of battery production share, Panasonic has maintained close ties with Toyota motor vehicles and Tesla.
In the U.S., Honda will jointly purchase products from South Korea's LG Energy Solutions (LGES) with a partnership with GM to further reduce procurement costs. According to the Korean media "Daily Economic News", LGES plans to establish a battery joint venture with Honda Automobile in the United States, and the investment scale may be as high as 4 trillion won (about 3.4 billion US dollars).