Honda to join hands with General Motors for Plug-in Hybrid technology collaboration

The hybrid vehicles are highly popular in the global market, not only as they are environment friendly but also cool to drive. Hybrids offer conventional drive experience and sometimes even better with a very silent and peaceful drive experience, not to mention the high fuel economy and less dependency on the fossil fuels. Plug-in Hybrid vehicle models are even better, as they are more environment-friendly being primarily battery driven. The Plug-in Hybrids also gets rid of the range trouble by incorporating internal combustion engine to extend the range when needed.

Thus, for those who wish to combine the benefits of a Hybrid vehicle and a fully electric vehicle, Plug-in Hybrids are surely the choice. While most of the global car majors are high on the green car technologies, the Japanese car major Honda Motor is really not impressive in this field. It hardly offers any impressive popular hybrid cars in the market and faces grave situation, as more and more green cars get mandated in the developed car markets of the world such as the US and China. Now, both of these two huge car markets are simply indispensible for a car major like Honda. So, what does it do in the next couple of decade’s time, when only electric and hybrid cars are supposed to be running most of the roads of the world? The answer is, Honda will be launching a slew of Hybrid and Plug-in Hybrid vehicle models in the next decade’s time, so it is really not going out of business.

However, the task of developing great new green cars is huge and Honda is surely running out of time. There is of course the Honda Clarity, which has been grabbing eye balls and headlines at several auto events around the world. The Honda Clarity will be the company’s brand new hydrogen powered fuel cell car that showcases the car maker’s prowess in building environment friendly cars, but what about the massively and increasingly popular Hybrid and Plug-in Hybrids? Honda is certainly working full swing on these technologies as well, as the company says that it will be launching several hybrid models that will also include many Plug-in Hybrids.

As per the latest reports, Honda Motor is in the final stage of its negotiations with the American auto major General Motors in order to enter into a joint venture to work on Plug-in Hybrid technology. It is a known fact that green cars are rather expensive and the cost of developing such technologies is massive. Thus, more and more car manufacturers are increasingly joining hands for the research and develop purposes of such technologies rather than going solo. The collaboration helps in splitting the development costs between the collaborating companies, which helps in keeping the price of their green cars low in order to make them more acceptable for the buyers in the market.

It is known that GM has advanced in the plug-in hybrid technology compared to Honda, while Honda is ahead of GM in fuel cell technology. Thus, both the companies can benefit each other in terms of green cars.