Japan’s Honda Motor said on Tuesday it is introducing a new electric vehicle brand in China, and will use components from local companies including CATL,
  • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    71·
    7 months ago

    Honda used to have a partnership with GM for EV battery development. Id imagine they’re trying to make better and cheaper batteries. US wont get them though, our government will probably ban them from selling anything made in partnership with Huawei because ‘china bad’ and proping up US automotive industry at the expense of others is more American than anything except selling weapons to both sides of a conflict.

      • Ptsf@lemmy.world
        1·
        7 months ago

        GM produces their own Ultium cells, but the partnership was mainly for the rest of the vehicle. (Control systems, etc, etc) so they could slap a Honda infotainment system into it and a different set of sheet metal on it and say they’ve got an ev in their fleet for tax and fleet fuel efficiency reasons.

      • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        7 months ago

        My insight to why is limited to what seemed like a tradeeoff where GM got info on how Hondas hydrogen powered research and development and in return GM shared theirs for batteries. A large percentage or engineers in Detroit are not sold on EVs, especially for things bigger than cars, or applications requiring more power density. If it wasn’t for government essentially forcing them to start transitioning to EVs, most of them wouldn’t be.