Enlarge / Honda is investing CAD$15 billion (US $11 billion) to expand EV manufacturing in North America with four sites in Ontario, Canada. (credit: Honda)

Honda announced today that it will spend $11 billion to expand its electric vehicle manufacturing presence in North America. The Japanese automaker already has a number of factories in the US, Mexico, and Canada, and it's this last one that will benefit from the expansion, with four EV-related plants planned for Ontario.

Honda says it has begun evaluating requirements for what it's calling an "innovative and environmentally responsible" EV factory and a standalone EV battery plant in Alliston, Ontario, which is already home to Honda's two existing Canadian manufacturing facilities.

Additionally, the automaker wants to set up another two sites as joint ventures. One will be a plant that processes cathode active materials and their precursors—the various elements like nickel and manganese that are combined with lithium in lithium-ion batteries—set up in a partnership with POSCO Future M, a South Korean battery material and chemical company. (POSCO is already working with General Motors on another joint venture battery precursor material facility in Betancour, Quebec, that is supposed to become operational in 2026.)

Enlarge / Honda's forward collision warning system has always been sensitive. Now the NHTSA is investigating some Hondas for false-positive automatic emergency brake activations. (credit: Honda)

This week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration decided to expand an ongoing investigation into the alarming tendency of some modern Hondas to inappropriately trigger their automatic emergency braking systems. Studies have shown that automatic emergency braking systems have reduced road deaths in the US, Europe, and China, but so-called phantom braking problems have dogged systems from Tesla and Honda.

We first learned of the problem in 2022, when NHTSA opened a preliminary investigation into the matter, based on 278 complaints. Now, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation has received 1,294 complaints from drivers of Honda CR-Vs (model years 2017–2022) and Honda Accords (model years 2018–2022), all claiming that their Hondas' automatic emergency braking system slammed on the brakes with no apparent obstruction in the way.

Honda says it's aware of even more cases—1,991 in all, and NHTSA says that, when it takes out cases where multiple reports affect the same vehicle, it knows of 2,976 reports of inadvertent automatic emergency braking, with 93 injury reports and 47 crashes to date.

Enlarge / We still think hydrogen fuel cells make more sense for static generators like the ones in the background, but Honda decided to make a fuel cell-powered CRV. (credit: Honda)

Hydrogen as a fuel source for light passenger vehicles is a tough sell in the US. It has a woefully underdeveloped refueling infrastructure in the US, being almost nonexistent outside of California, and even there, retail hydrogen stations are closing down. And hydrogen prices fluctuate like crazy, with recent costs hitting $33 per kilogram, when you can even get it. In short, it seems like a weird time for a company to introduce a new hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, but that's just what Honda is doing with its awkwardly named CR-V e:FCEV.

The fuel cell CR-V is unique in a few ways that make it interesting, the biggest of which is that it's effectively a plug-in hybrid, only instead of an internal combustion engine being paired with an electric drivetrain, this has a fuel cell powering a 17.7 kWh battery pack and a traction motor that bears more resemblance to one you'd find in an EV than in a traditional PHEV. Cool, right?

The biggest question that we have is simply why?

Enlarge / Honda definitely doesn't want you to think of the Prologue as a rebadged Chevy Blazer EV, and it has worked quite hard to make it feel like a Honda. (credit: Robin Warner)

HEALDSBURG, Calif. — The beginning of Honda’s transition story away from internal combustion starts, fittingly enough, with the Prologue. The Japanese brand’s first mainstream battery-electric vehicle for the United States market plops right in the center of the red-hot midsize crossover SUV segment.

At first glance, the Prologue looks awfully similar to the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV, and for good reason. The two share the Ultium platform structure as a foundation, not to mention the same 121.8-inch (3,094-mm) wheelbase and very similar dimensions. However, the Prologue measures a smidge shorter, wider, and lower at 192 inches (4,877 mm) long, 78.3 inches (1,989 mm) wide, and 64.7 inches (1,643 mm) tall.

A nod to ’80s design

Indeed, Honda engineers moved to southeast Michigan to join GM in creating this platform, and much of the Prologue’s development happened in Michigan, not Ohio. "We didn’t want to change the Ultium platform," John Hwang, project lead of the Honda Prologue, said. "We want to take the best part of that: great suspension, great performance, great range."

Enlarge / The passenger airbag in some new Hondas and Acuras is very advanced and designed to prevent brain injuries. But a faulty sensor in the seat of some cars means it might deploy when it's not supposed to. (credit: Honda)

Honda is recalling more than 750,000 vehicles manufactured between 2020 and 2022. Honda says that a weight sensor, which is meant to disable the passenger airbags if the seat is occupied by a child or child seat, might not work properly, allowing the airbags to deploy during a crash.

Exposure to humidity can cause a capacitor in the sensor to crack and leak, making it inoperable. The problem has been traced to a change in the base material for the sensor's printed circuit board—Honda's tier 1 supplier made the change when a natural disaster disrupted production at the tier 2 supplier that normally provided the base material. The changed circuit board was not properly verified and "could allow additional strain to the printed circuit board that can lead to a capacitor cracking and an internal short circuit."

A warranty claim in August 2020 was Honda's first inkling that it had a problem. Initial investigations turned up little, but the automaker kept receiving warranty claims and, in January 2024, decided to issue a recall. In total, it says it has had 3,834 warranty claims for this issue between June 2020 and January 2024.

Enlarge / Anode and cathode "inks" are applied to carbon-fiber paper. (credit: GM/Honda)

BROWNSTOWN, Mich.—Today, a joint venture between General Motors and Honda Motor Company, named Fuel Cell System Manufacturing LLC (FCSM LLC), officially started producing its one and only product—a fuel cell system—on a commercial scale. FCSM officially began in January of 2017 with an initial investment between GM and Honda of $85,000,000. Now, the 70,000-square-foot (6,500 m2) facility in Brownstown, Michigan, houses 80 employees and enough robots, clean rooms, and all sorts of high-tech equipment to make Ironman blush.

FCSM managing to build fuel cells quickly, reliably, and cost effectively is what's new here, not the fuel cells themselves. And, according to Tetsuo Suzuki, vice president of FCSM LLC, that proved the biggest challenge. "Our fuel cell system consists of more than 300 individual cells [307 in total], each cell is composed of very expensive materials. If there is a defect in even one cell, the entire stack would be unusable," Suzuki said. "Therefore, we designed all of our mass production processes with a zero-defect mindset." Adding, "We introduced quality control into every process."

This is the assembly line. (credit: GM/Honda)

How to build a fuel cell

More specifically, each cell consists of several parts, starting with two different liquids that FCSM calls "inks." One ink forms an anode, the other, a cathode. FCSM then pours each liquid onto a carbon-fiber paper, which it then heats to dry. It then precisely cuts these two different papers into shape and bonds them together to form what it calls a unitized electrode assembly, or UEA; the cathode on one side, the anode on the other. Both of the anode and cathode sheets are black, but the cathode sheet is gloss, and the anode sheet is matte.

Enlarge / Infotainment system in a 2016 Ford Escape. (credit: Getty Images | Todd Korol )

A federal appeals court rejected lawsuits that alleged five major carmakers violated a Washington state privacy law. The lawsuits centered on car infotainment systems that store text messages in a way that potentially allows the messages to be retrieved by law enforcement using specialized hardware and software. The rulings in the carmakers' favor came in cases against Ford, General Motors, Honda, Toyota, and Volkswagen.

A three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit unanimously upheld US District Court rulings that dismissed the five class-action lawsuits, which were almost identical. The appeals court ruled in Ford's favor on October 27, then issued rulings upholding the dismissals of the other four cases on Tuesday this week.

We'll cover the Ford ruling here since the other decisions don't go into the same level of detail, and the arguments were similar in all five cases. The simple version is that the cases failed because the plaintiffs' data stayed in the car systems and apparently was never transmitted to law enforcement, Ford, or anyone else.

Enlarge / The Motocompacto was the product of one engineer's spare time. (credit: Kevin Williams)

The transition to electrified transportation can come across as boring, which, arguably, isn't all that untrue. Shouty, gas-powered sports cars have been replaced on roads by beige-colored electric crossovers. Electric scooters are ubiquitous now, cavalierly and awkwardly piled up on street corners of any global metropolitan center, serving as last-mile solutions for those unwilling to wait in traffic in the backseat of a rideshare car. It's hard to remember that electric vehicles can be fun, exciting, interesting, and maybe most importantly—cute. The Honda Motocompacto might just be the cutest little last-mile solution and maybe the most exciting electric vehicle on the market, even if Honda itself isn't quite sure what to do with it.

The Motocompacto certainly looks like no other electric scooter on the market. Appearing like a secret agent's gadget from the Spy Kids universe, the all-white box can transform from what easily could be confused as a briefcase to an oddly rectangular sit-down scooter. Unique, if not unfamiliar, the Motocompacto's form factor could seem a little contrarian in the era of traditional stand-up scooters or sit-down moped ones. I mean, who wants to straddle a motorized briefcase?

Well, it's because the Motocompacto is a modern reinterpretation of an iconic Honda scooter—the Motocompo. Back in the early 1980s, Honda sold a square-shaped (gas-powered) scooter, meant to fold up and fit in the trunk of its City subcompact hatchback. Even though neither the Motocompo nor the Honda City ever made their way outside of Japan, the outrageously cute form factor serves as inspiration for the similarly named Motocompacto. Heck, Honda has even shown it off in the cargo area of the Prologue EV crossover, surely a nod to this charmingly Ska-filled ad.

Enlarge / A GM Ultium battery pack. (credit: Santa Fabio for General Motors)

Bad news for fans of cheaper electric vehicles: The planned collaboration between Honda and General Motors on a range of cheaper EVs has been canceled. The joint project, which was announced in April 2022, was supposed to develop a new platform for use in lower-cost EVs for North America, South America, and China, with cars appearing in 2027. But on Thursday, the two companies revealed that the plan is no more.

"After extensive studies and analysis, we have come to a mutual decision to discontinue the program. Each company remains committed to affordability in the EV market," Honda and GM said in a joint statement.

"After studying this for a year, we decided that this would be difficult as a business, so at the moment we are ending development of an affordable EV," said Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe in an interview with Bloomberg. "GM and Honda will search for a solution separately. This project itself has been canceled," Mibe said.