Say it ain’t so!
Honda Motor Co. has plans to develop autonomous cars with “Level 4″ capability that can drive on city streets by 2025, building on its strategy to take on automotive rivals of the future.
Unveiling its mid-term Vision 2030 strategy plan on Thursday, Honda said it would boost coordination between R&D, procurement and manufacturing to reduce development costs and states that ” . . .it must look beyond conventional vehicles to survive in an industry that is moving rapidly into electric and self-driving cars.”
Honda has already spelled out plans to market a vehicle which can drive itself on highways by 2020, and the new target for city-capable self-driving cars puts its progress slightly behind rivals like BMW Group.
“We’re going to place utmost priority on electrification and advanced safety technologies going forward,” Honda CEO Takahiro Hachigo said.
Honda established a division late last year to develop electric vehicles as part of its long-held goal for lower-emission gasoline hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to account for two-thirds of its lineup by 2030, from about 5 percent now.
By 2025, Honda plans to come up with cars with level 4 standard automated driving functions, meaning they can drive themselves on highways and city roads under most situations.
Achieving such capabilities will require artificial intelligence to detect traffic movements, along with a battery of cameras and sensors to help avoid accidents.
BMW has said it would launch a fully autonomous car by 2021, while Ford Motor has said it will introduce a vehicle with similar capabilities for ride-sharing purposes in the same year. Nissan Motor is planning to launch a car which can drive automatically on city streets by 2020.
Honda has been ramping up r&d spending, earmarking a record 750 billion yen ($6.84 billion) for the year to March.
I own a ’00 Civic (that has been very good to me) but Honda is a big greenie. Going back to the late ’90’s when Yamaha revolutionized the motocross bike industry with their four stroke YZM400, who showed how a four stroke could be competitive against the two strokes (sure…with major cc advantages but that’s another rant). Honda was the next of the Big 4 to develop a 450 and 250 four stroke MX bikes. They fully embraced it and have never looked back (after Yamaha did all the heavy lifting and took all the risk with the YZM400). They hate two strokes, with a passion, because of how “dirty” they are. Eventhough a bunch of closed-course competition MX bikes is like a spec of sand when it comes to the overall pollution. In fact, their MX bikes were about the only thing they still had a two stroke engine in dating back to that era if I remember correctly. They’ve always been a four stroke company. Them wanting to go EV doesn’t surprise me in the least. The only reason they’re not leading the charge is because part of their business model is to have someone else do the dirty work and heavy lifting of new development/technologies.
Even now, as the last of the Japanese (save Yamaha) two stroke MX bikes from the late ’90’s and early ’00’s are going for ridiculous prices due to demand, and there is a big push from riders to offer more two stroke MX bikes, apparently Honda is the big hold up. And the manufacturers run the racing series at the top level. So no rules get changed without their say so and Honda is the biggest of all of them (eventhough KTM is starting to eat everyone’s lunch when it comes to offroad/MX bikes sales). KTM/Husqvarna sell every two stroke bike they make from what I’ve heard, and Yamaha still offers and sells a lot of them. There’s big talk of at least bringing back 125’s, with Suzuki and Kawasaki on board with the idea and apparently having prototypes ready to go, but Big Red not so. They wanted the two stroke to be dead forever and will prob. do everything they can to never have to manufacture another one. We’ll see.
Honda was left behind on hybrids and doesn’t want it to happen again. I’m sure they are being told this is the future and they want to be a part of it.
I think Honda peaked in the late 90’s as the newer models do not seem as quality.
I have two Hondas. Crap.
Chinese high-speed railway in Turkey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMLomlq0r-g
All one belt one road one love for Big Brother.
5 minutes of adrenaline rush street racing between BMW 1000 versus Honda Repsol CBR 1000
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmVMOr7TIrc
That sucks….. Honda of all companies should be fighting for internal combustion engines. They make probably the worlds largest selection of them.
The pressure to stop making them must be so enormous. The uncles and their greenie buddies of the world are hellbent on getting rid them. Even though there is no good reason to do so. None, what so ever.
Does Honda see they are going to make them into the next Volvo? A company that doesn’t have a reason to even exist anymore? Why don’t they fight for themselves anymore?