Honda's New $4.4 Billion EV Battery Plant Will Be Built In Ohio (cnbc.com) 52
Honda Motor and LG Energy Solution on Tuesday said a new multibillion-dollar plant to produce batteries for electric vehicles will be located in Ohio. CNBC reports: Construction of the new facility -- located about 40 miles southwest of Columbus -- is expected to begin in early 2023, followed by mass production of lithium-ion batteries by the end of 2025. The battery plant is expected to cost $3.5 billion, with overall investment by the unnamed joint venture eventually reaching $4.4 billion, the companies said. Honda and LGES announced plans for the joint venture and battery plant last year, but had not revealed a location. The facility is expected to employ about 2,200 people, the companies said.
In addition to the new battery plant, Honda on Tuesday said it plans to invest $700 million to retool several of its existing auto and powertrain plants for production of EVs. The Japanese automaker expects to begin production and sales of EVs in North America in 2026. Honda has plans to phase out traditional internal combustion engines and exclusively offer battery-electric and fuel cell electric vehicles by 2040 in North America. It's part of the company's plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
In addition to the new battery plant, Honda on Tuesday said it plans to invest $700 million to retool several of its existing auto and powertrain plants for production of EVs. The Japanese automaker expects to begin production and sales of EVs in North America in 2026. Honda has plans to phase out traditional internal combustion engines and exclusively offer battery-electric and fuel cell electric vehicles by 2040 in North America. It's part of the company's plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
Ohio? (Score:1)
Anybody else see the irony of all these battery factories being built in the most coal-rollin', anti-EV states?
Is Ohio anti-EV? (Score:3)
Hmm...
Wasn't aware Ohio had a lot of "coal rollers" in it, or that it's particularly anti-EV. Wouldn't, say, Texas take that title better?
Still:
1. Lots of room to grow
2. End of traditional hydrocarbon energy would leave workers available for the factory
3. Lower prices mean lower manufacturing costs.
4. EV reluctance might decrease if they know they have a stake in the business
etc...
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So didn't ~24 other states. That isn't enough evidence to claim "most anti-EV", I'd argue.
Hell, I'm in Florida and the Teslas are still rare in my part, but increasing rapidly. It's now a rare day of driving that I don't see at least one.
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In 2016, 56% of us voted for Hilliary,
56% of who, the 30% or so of eligible voters who cast ballots?
Anyone remember Dennis Kucinich? The Ohio Democrat Party killed his career with gerrymandering. Lol.
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In 2016, 56% of us voted for Hilliary,
56% of who, the 30% or so of eligible voters who cast ballots?
Ohio voter turnout in the 2016 general election [ohiosos.gov] was over 70%.
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Your source calculates the percentage of registered voters who voted to be 73%. GP's claim is about "eligible voters," which might reasonably be interpreted to include people who could have registered to vote, but didn't register or were purged from rolls for some reason. However, those numbers are not too hard to find.
In 2020, the Census Bureau says [census.gov] there were 9.17M people in OH aged 18+, which means 88% of eligible OH voters were registered and 65% of eligible voters voted. If the Census and OH Sec-State
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I don't know why I have to point this out, but only regtered voters are eligible to vote. The interpretation you suggested is not reasonable, though an uninformed person might wish to think it's fine.
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Note that the above is an upper bound on the vote-eligible population and a corresponding lower bound on the percentage of eligible OH voters. Not everyone 18+ is necessarily a citizen.
I'm not sure why tsqr wants to pick a fight about whether unregistered voters can vote. Obviously they can't. But in a conversation about turnout, it's interesting (and indeed reasonable) to talk about people who could have voted if they filled out some paperwork.
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Nope. Manufacturers are supposed to carefully select sites for their capital investments, including factoring in tax rates, regulatory burden and business climate. It took longer than it should have for many of these captains of industry to remember that part, but it appears they finally got there.
I recommend you pursue an Ohio battery boycott immediately. Otherwise you may one day find yourself faced with a market dominated by battery powered products manufactured by unenlightened knuckle-dragging gar
Re: Ohio? (Score:2)
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unenlightened knuckle-dragging garbage people from states like Ohio
Being this full of hatred of millions of people you've never met based only on the prejudice of who they voted for in an election seems super unhealthy. Are you sure you haven't become a hate filled person who has unwittingly become a victim of extremification?
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Uh, pretty sure that was a sarcastic comment directed at the OP, who was the one making the claim about Ohio being anti-EV coal rollers.
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The Ohio battery boycott part should have made that clear at the very least, but hey; I value sarcasm too much to forgo it because morons.
Re:Ohio? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe this will plant a seed of change.
Re:Ohio? - Look at the map (Score:1)
It is fact that much of Ohio leans Republican, and this new facility will be in a county where 75% of the populace voted for Trump in 2020. Many of the area residents question the validity of global climate change or the need for BEVs based on their political leaning. However, as others have pointed out, it is more about taxes and location than residents' politics. Case in point, this new batter factory will be about half-way between Dayton and Columbus. Both of those cities have lots of history in manufact
Re:Ohio? - Look at the map (Score:4, Insightful)
No. The Ohio district maps have been gerrymandered so badly that the state legislature is heavily Republican, but straw polling on the ground shows a majority of voters lean Democrat. Ohio is probably the least democratic state in the nation based on relative representation.
Honda has EVs? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm confused. Last I checked, they were dedicated to ICE and never offering a split folding rear seat on the Accord sedan.
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I'm confused. Last I checked, they were dedicated to ICE and never offering a split folding rear seat on the Accord sedan.
Or try to get a new Honda with a manual transmission or w/o keyless ignition. (sigh)
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They are for sure making an electric right-hand drive model. Maybe they are selling BEV only in some markets.
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The Honda e, their first EV, was not released in the US. It's available in Europe and Japan.
It's a mostly excellent car. The best HMI on the market, with physical controls where needed and a great touch screen system for things like navigation. The suspension is fantastic and handles the extra weight of the battery well. It is mirrorless, using cameras for the side and rear-view "mirrors" that provide better night vision than a reflective surface does.
It has all the gadgets, and the autopilot implementation
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I'm confused. Last I checked, they were dedicated to ICE and never offering a split folding rear seat on the Accord sedan.
Yeah, they like to pretend they're not interested.
Credit where due (Score:3)
Musk drove Tesla over the last decade to do what industry and financial experts insisted could not be done. And kicked over a lot of apple carts along the way.
Had he not done so, I am sure we would still be reading carefully researched reports from all directions that BEVs are "not economically viable with current technology at this time." Then gone on to grind out the next generation of mega-belch trucks and SUVs.
Anyone care to argue any different?
Re: Credit where due (Score:1)
Tesla did a damn good job of selling fancy luxury gizmos to enough influential people to get a buzz going. It did little to alter the physics of battery energy density.
The airplane yoke in the fanciest model s did more to alter the thinking of the ruling class than any technical innovation in that car.
Since it's mostly smoke and mirrors, there is a limit to how far it can penetrate. My evidence for both parts of that statement is the perpetual nonsense I keep reading about electric airliners replacing all j
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It did little to alter the physics of battery energy density.
It did quite a lot to reduce battery charge times though. And availability of charging stations...
Meanwhile, batteries are slowly getting denser and denser.
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
And electric motors are getting better, which adds up to the same thing:
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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And electric motors are getting better, which adds up to the same thing:
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Improvements in electric motors are incremental and not required. There is little to gain when efficiency is already above 95%.
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" the perpetual nonsense I keep reading "
Stop reading Fox News all the time.
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I doubt if more than 10% Americans knew or admit that China is ahead of the US in BEV
When you say "ahead", cheering someone who says "far ahead" do you mean in charging networks, battery technology, or consumer market sales numbers? Asking for a friend.
If you mean charging network rollout, yeah it's too bad there are two standards in the US and only one standard in China, but surely you're not basing a comparison on the charging networks, right???
If you mean car technology, yeah Tesla's new LFP battery technology [which unvailed to mass-market in China] is really going to take over the BEV
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Elon was the most vocal person in the US pushing BEV, but to claim he drove it undermines the hard work by thousands of engineers that did the work.
I have to ask "why do people credit 1 person with the work done by thousands?" By himself Elon wouldn't have changed BEV world.
Huh? Somebody has to put up the money, build the research facilities, hire those engineers, then cross their fingers to hope they get results.
Who in the USA would have done that? GM? Ford?
Elon may not have done the engineering work himself but he 100% "drove" it.
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I'm not a Musk fan in any way, but I can't disagree with you. People forget that "back in the day" cancelled the leases on its electric vehicle, recalled them and destroyed them...over the objection of happy consumers. The narrative from the auto industry was exactly what you said: "Not viable at this time".
Yes, the engineers he hired did a good job, but those engineers don't deserve much (or maybe any) credit. The story on electric cars was over. The US auto giants said so, and the Japanese and Europe
Re:Credit where due (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a Musk fan in any way, but I can't disagree with you. People forget that "back in the day" cancelled the leases on its electric vehicle, recalled them and destroyed them...over the objection of happy consumers. The narrative from the auto industry was exactly what you said: "Not viable at this time".
That was GM, by the way, and I've looked into the backstory on that.
1. Consumers were indeed happy with the cars, however, they cost drastically more then they were leased for. Each one was a major loss leader.
2. They were only produced due to the regulations of the time.
3. There weren't many of them, relatively speaking, and they actually sucked compared to modern EVs. This is from being made initially with Lead-Acid batteries, eventually upgraded to NiMH. LiIon has about twice the energy density over NiMH...
Okay, but the above doesn't factor in why GM decided to crush them rather than sell them. Sunk costs and all that, they could have made some money selling them, BUT:
1. In order to try to limit the weight increases from the battery packs, GM made the frames largely out of aluminum. This increased manufacturing costs, of course, but the kicker was: GM didn't have good data on how long said frames would last. Basically, the frame and other parts were viewed as lawsuit bait. Not worth the cost.
2. Parts availability. If GM sells vehicles, they lock themselves into having to provide parts for X years. I believe this is also mandated by law in some areas. Remember, EV1 cars cost a lot more to build than they were sold at. This is because a lot of parts were custom, and therefore keeping a stock around would be expensive.
3. They figured that people would be a lot less happy with their cars as various bits they put in with limited service lives started failing. There were apparently a lot of them, as the EV1 was already a losing prospect, so they cheaped out whenever they could.
Re:Credit where due (Score:4, Informative)
Oh yeah, add to the list:
4. The incentives/requirements changed so that car companies could make them without producing EV vehicles, and EV vehicles died left and right from many makers during that time.
Forgot a point:
The shift from NiMH to LiIon came with around double the energy density. That means for the same weight of batteries, a car could have twice the range. A 60 mile EV would instantly have 120 miles of range simply by changing out the battery chemistry(figure everything else stayed the same). As a bonus, LiIon actually lasts longer, handles charging better, has better environmental tolerance, etc...
So in a sense, the EV1 was indeed "before its time" in that battery technology wasn't quite to the point of providing an affordable EV with sufficient range for a wide range of consumers...
Add in the usual stuff about 15 years of development - new ways to make the cars lighter, for example. Electric motors and their electronics developed further as well.
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In the '90, Fiat made a Panda with an electric motor and lead-acid batteries, later NiCd and actually sold some of them, but they were really expensive and due the weight of the batteries an the power of the electric engine they had awful speed. You could rent one of them in Turin. They were actually sold and the few remaining ones in roadworthy state are sought by collectors.
The big difference is thaqt the electric Panda
Yep (Score:2)
This is why I mentioned that the shredding was specifically by GM with the EV1.
Some other EVs made by other manufacturers were done differently. Like I said - sunk costs. If Fiat made their Panda using standard systems while the EV1 was full of custom stuff, down to the frame, it explains a lot. As I understand it, they weren't even sure the aluminum welds would hold up. So if the Panda was otherwise standard, other than the EV stuff that might need custom repairs, you can at least work on them.
Italy vs
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Tesla is much more popular in the US than it is in Europe, and they came to the European market much later.
For us, Nissan and Renault (part of the same group) were the ones who really pushed forward EV adoption. The Leaf in particular proved that EVs were viable even with relatively small batteries. They became very popular with commercial users and private owners alike, and they outsold Tesla for many years. Nissan also produced the eNV-2000 van, which was adopted by a lot of companies and local government
Re: Credit where due (Score:2)
Political stability is now a location factor (Score:2)
It's suddenly no longer that important to produce cheaply if you can't ensure that you can produce at all, or that your property is still yours if the local government gets even more crazy.
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That's why we need fully automated robotic factories, maybe floating ones.
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Why should I buy worker drones when I can rent them and outsource repairing and replacing them to society?
Re:Where will the lithium come from? (Score:5, Interesting)
where is Honda going to get the lithium from
Short-term? I dunno.
Middle-term? From EV battery recyclers.
Long term? From the ocean.
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Short-term? I dunno.
Australia has opened like four new lithium mines in the last couple years, including a new one literally this week [abc.net.au]!
There's still a lot of short term pressure on lithium pricing because of demand but I think (hope?) as the mines scale up operations we'll see that change.
40 miles southwest of Columbus... (Score:2)
...so Cincinnati?
I'm a bit curious of this particular location, it's far enough from the Great Lakes to make export via the St. Lawrence Seaway require trucking or rail-shipping batteries to reach a port. On the other hand it's close to the Ohio River, which if teh wikis is to be believe, is navigable all of the way to West Virginia, so shipping batteries by-barge down and out the Mississippi River may be practical. I guess it depends on where the factories integrating them into vehicles will be located.