Mibe careworn that gasoline-electric hybrids will stay a key aspect of Honda’s lineup properly into the 2030s and that he expects demand for them to extend in some locations.
“We’ll proceed to depend on hybrids as one among our highly effective weapons,” he mentioned.
However Honda, which sells about 4.5 million automobiles a 12 months worldwide, has a protracted strategy to go earlier than transferring to full battery-electric automobiles.
Since advertising and marketing its first in 1997, the Honda EV Plus, the corporate has bought solely 32,649 BEVs cumulatively. Nearly half them, 14,324, bought in 2021 alone.
Honda has made a a lot larger market dent with hybrids, a section it helped pioneer with the Perception. It has bought 3.9 million hybrids cumulatively over time, together with 561,165 gasoline-electrics in 2021.
The limited-run EV Plus, a squat three-door microcar, was Honda’s first EV, however the battery-powered model of the low-selling Readability sedan was the primary to be marketed within the U.S.
Immediately, its solely international all-electric providing is the Honda e city runabout, and it isn’t bought within the U.S. Honda bought 9,226 of the subcompact hatchbacks in Europe and Japan by way of the top of 2021, together with 4,171 final 12 months. The corporate additionally sells three domestically targeted electrical fashions within the China market.
Naoto Okamura contributed to this report.