Honda cancels plan to develop affordable EVs with GM

Back in April of last year, Honda and GM announced plans to develop a series of affordable EVs by 2027, which would use a new architecture based on GM's Ultium batteries. They spoke about putting together production capacity for millions of such vehicles even.

Today, Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe revealed that the entire aforementioned plan has been canceled. "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. GM and Honda will search for a solution separately. This project itself has been canceled", Mibe told Bloomberg in no uncertain terms.

Mibe went on to cite costs and "cruising distance challenges" as reasons for halting the previously announced plan. That plan was to make EVs priced below $30,000 in the US. By joining forces, the two companies hoped to reduce battery costs faster and be able to develop new EVs at prices that would position them to better compete with the likes of Tesla and BYD.

But now none of that will happen, so it remains to be seen whether GM and Honda can separately come up with cheaper EVs at some point in the future.

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