Opinion
Honda’s electric masterplan is in tatters – is the car industry about to lose a household name giant?
Published: 16 Mar 2026
In October 2024, I took Honda up on an invitation to visit the future. The future of Honda, of electric cars… heck, the future of the entire car world. The epicentre was naturally Japan, which to a Westerner always feels like a portal to a world 30 years more advanced than our own. Honda is usually secretive. This was exciting. What I was presented with wasn’t a new car, but a new philosophy of car making. A philosophy which, 18 months later in early 2026, Honda has spectacularly binned.
Make no mistake, even as Porsche records a 92 per cent drop in annual profits, and Volkswagen admits it’ll sack 50,000 workers by 2030, Honda’s hero-to-Zero moment is staggeringly, eye-wateringly serious. Honda had played it very cool on the EV front, insisting it wasn’t right to plunge headlong into Tesla-chasing until it could engineer rivals in an altruistic, virtuous-circle kinda way. Its dabble with electric city cars (in the cute, pricey Honda e) had been a noble but unprofitable flop. We were told many lessons had been learned.
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The result was to be the 0 Series: a family of radically different electric cars named after the 0 Series Shinkansen bullet train, so-called because it was a ‘reset to zero’ moment for public transport that took the rest of the world about 30 years. In the UK, we’re still arguing about how to make faster trains go underneath someone’s garden. Meanwhile, the bullet trains have carried 6.5 billion people since 1964 and never had a single fatal accident.
When the Japanese set their minds to a bold engineering challenge, they are a force to be reckoned with: mighty yet meticulous. As innovative as they are considerate. So the 0 Series cars were radical. Instead of simply having the biggest possible battery, or the slipperiest body, we were told (repeatedly) that the cars were shot through with one mantra: ‘thin, light, wise.’
‘Thin’ meant engineering slimmer batteries to keep roof height low (reducing drag) without eating through the floor (increasing space). The armoured case around the battery enjoyed the same approach. Honda demonstrated colossal robotic presses that made battery cases six per cent thinner than rivals, yet offering greater strength. These mega-pressings were fashioned from five pieces of metal, instead of 60 or more in rivals.
The machines required were enormous and expensive. They lived in new factories, populated with new staff with new training. No expense was spared. I walked around these labyrinthine factories, dwarfed by their hardware, mouth agape at the investment. It was like a space programme. Same goes for the propulsion. Honda created inverters 40 per cent smaller than the industry standard. New motors offered 17 per cent less internal friction than its previous offerings. Honda said this gave 12 extra miles of range, which in turn negated having the smaller battery. ‘Wise’.
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So, the virtuous circle went round and round. Roomy cabins thanks to slender powertrains, which saved weight, which increased efficiency and sped up charging. And saved cost, which lessened prices. A lower, lighter, faster car is a more fun car to drive. Honda also promised all-new steer-by-wire, and advanced autonomous driver aids. A new thinking for Honda. You’ll note none of this is cheap to do.
And this wasn’t for some sort of one-off flagship. Honda insisted the 0 Series was a growing family. First, a rakish saloon and a blocky SUV. Then a couple more crossovers and even a big three-row XXL model. The 0 Series was Honda’s answer to the BMW Neue Klasse, now underway with the impressive iX3 but set to spawn 40 – yes, forty – new models by the end of the first wave.
But there was an alarm bell ringing. On one slide presented by yet another conscientious bowing engineer, we were told the first 0 Series models would feature a battery between 80 and 90kWh in capacity, with an EPA range estimate of around 300 miles. Though America’s EPA test is harsher than Europe’s lab lie-detector, 300 miles ain’t much. It’s about a hundred miles less than a Tesla Model 3 projects with a smaller battery. Honda was on par with what BMW gives you in an i5. But the i5 is old-tech. It’s a combustion car kitted out with batteries, not a cutting-edge shockwave of new ideas and blue-sky thinking.
But that’s not the reason Honda has given for this cataclysmic halt order. It’s blamed geopolitical tensions, Trump tariffs, and cooling demand for EVs and governments wobbling on deadlines to go all-in on EVs. All of which is fair enough, I mean: can you remember the last time you went a week without hearing the words ‘unprecedented crisis’ in the news? We’ve been in non-stop tumult since Covid.
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And mere months away from full-scale 0 Series production, with factories already tooled up, dealers trained, brochures printed and years of R&D waiting to be paid back, Honda has decided that writing off something in the ballpark of 2.5 trillion Yen – or a cool £11.5 billion – is less of a risk than trying to actually sell some EVs.
Having seen first-hand the scale of this operation back in 2024, that’s a fairly terrifying thought. Especially as similar conversations will be happening at car companies in France, Germany, Italy, Japan… everywhere except China, really.
Hate to sound like a doom-monger, but there’s been a creeping sense of dread for a while that the car industry would eventually lose a big fish. A household name might not survive. Question is, in this fiercely unforgiving landscape, is anyone too big to fail?
