Yahoo Autos Honda, VW Making Wildly Different Bets on Our Electric Future
Volkswagen speeds up its electric vehicle production plans by two years. A million annually will now happen in 2023 instead of 2025.
Honda Motor's CEO, on the other hand, still sees hybrids as critically important and doesn't think people actually want EVs.
The answer to the question, "Who's right?" should not be long in coming, with numerous electric vehicles of all kinds coming in the next two years from manufacturers worldwide.
It's almost 2020, but Volkswagen is ready to turn the page of the calendar a bit further than just to the new year. The German automaker announced this week that it will make more electric vehicles in the early part of the next decade than it had previously planned. Instead of building a million EVs in 2025, VW is now planning to make that many in 2023, with 1.5 million now on the schedule for 2025. Those are big targets, since VW delivered 70,000 electrified vehicles around the world this year, up from 50,000 last year.
Planning a half-decade into the future is vital in the auto industry, where big changes can take years to implement. When different companies hint at different future trends they're going to be banking on, it allows us to play armchair product planners, just without the billions in costs or consequences.
Which brings us to Honda. Never the biggest battery-electric mobility proponent—the company has offered or offers the Fit EV, the electric version of the Clarity (pictured above), and the China-only VE-1 CUV, but only in limited numbers—Honda is taking a less plugged-in approach to the near future than VW. Despite Honda's stated goal of having two-thirds of its vehicles be electrified by 2030, Honda Motor CEO Takahiro Hachigo, interviewed by Automotive News Europe, said he expects standard gasoline-electric hybrids to play a "critical role" in the company's future.
