Honda CEO Takeo Fukui outlined green initiatives and product plans on Honda's corporate roadmap in his year-end speech for 2006. Among the sustainability-minded items on Honda's to-do list:
Honda will offer a new dedicated hybrid vehicle in 2009 "at a price level lower than the globally popular Civic Hybrid."
An experimental cellulosic ethanol plant to be built in Wako in 2007 will target mass production of bio-ethanol.
A new "resource/energy-recycling Green Factory" to be built in Yorii "will reduce the amount of CO2 emitted per automobile produced by 20% compared to the level of 2000."
A new engine plant to be built in Ogawa, Saitama (near Yorii) to meet growing demand for advanced, fuel-efficient engines is slated to begin production in summer 2009.
"New technologies such as advanced VTEC and VCM for automobiles and 'super-low friction engines' for motorcycles" will improve fuel efficiency and tailpipe emissions.
Honda will introduce a "super-clean diesel engine" that "will meet the stringent U.S. Tier‡UBIN5 emission standard, which reduces exhaust gas emissions to a level equal to a gasoline engine," in the US within the next three years, and possibly in Japan as well.
Subsidiary Honda Soltec (established earlier this month) will begin full-scale sales of solar cells when mass production begins at the new plant in Kumamoto in fall 2007.
Fuel cell: "A mass-production model based on the technology and design of the FCX Concept will become available for lease sales in 2008 in Japan and the U.S."
Hydrogen: "Honda will further advance the Home Energy Station, which produces hydrogen from natural gas, as well as the solar cell-based Hydrogen Station, which Honda has already begun testing in the U.S."
Following up on last April's R&D reorg, Honda will build a new R&D center in Sakura, Tochigi, slated to begin operation in 2009.
Fukui pledged that Honda will "reduce its environmental footprint" through ramped-up efforts to "reduce CO2 emissions through innovation of engine technologies and production of clean energy." He also noted that "in November, Honda began sales in Brazil of automobiles equipped with a flexible fuel vehicle (FFV) system, which enables gasoline engine-based power plants to operate on a wide range of ethanol-gasoline fuel mixtures between 20% to 100% ethanol. The Civic FFV went on sale in November and the Fit FFV in December."
