Honda may tie their fate with Nissan and Mitsubishi to survive the challenges of the 21st century.
Very few car companies today have managed to stay independent but Honda Motor is one of those rare exceptions. However with the challenges of electrification and increasingly stiff competition from the Chinese automotive industry things may be changing. A new report from Nikkei Asia indicates that an alliance between Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi may be formed soon. This was first hinted at in March.
The Japanese car industry has been attempting various partnership arrangements in recent memory.
Pre-pandemic we got word of cross-company investment into Toyota’s Monet Technologies involving Toyota, Hino, Honda, Isuzu, Suzuki, Subaru, Daihatsu and Mazda. Then Toyota and Honda started working together on mobile power generation testing. In April 2021, Toyota, Daihatsu, Mazda, Subaru and Suzuki decided to work together on in-car communications. Then in September 2021 we learnt about the Japan Automotive Model-Based Engineering (JAMBE) which brought together Subaru, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, and Mazda. Finally In late 2023, Toyota, Subaru, Nissan, Mazda & Honda said they would be working together on Japan-fabricated silicon tech.
It’s worth noting that all of these prior partnerships always involved Toyota to some degree. Now it looks as if the Nissan-Mitsubishi camp is independently approaching Honda for automotive software platforms and electric vehicle development.
While it doesn’t seem to be an extension of the Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance, this is definitely an interesting development and apparently one the stock market seems to approve of as each of the three Japanese brands’ stock prices were up as a result of the news. It’s also interesting to note that Honda has yet to settle on a firm direction for EV development. They’ve currently got one partnership with GM in North America for the Honda Prologue and two in China for the e:NP1 and e:NS1 with Dongfeng and GAC. Domestically they’ve got an electric kei car too. Their in-house Honda e showed some promise but has been discontinued and they recently showed a few alternative EV concepts. They’ve also hinted at working with Sony to create an alternate EV brand.
Still, they’ve given themselves until 2040 to make the switch to full electric so there’s still a lot of time left to make adjustments.
