Q+A Honda CEO Takanobu Ito

Honda's new CEO Takanobu Ito talks to Autocar about the problems with recycled carbonfibre and why he can't sell fuel cell cars.

Do you plan to give us more cars in the future with more platform sharing?

To be honest, we don’t sell a huge variety of cars in Europe. To sell a large variety would undermine our investment efficiency and impact our business. We want to respond to our customers’ needs, so for future cars we will try to offer more varied cars on the same platform and we are revisiting our development in that respect. We will try to reduce the number of platforms, but this will take time.

In Europe Toyota is seen as the green car company, despite Honda’s long history with hybrids. How do you address this?

Our European sales people are largely to blame. We tried to enhance our position with the Civic hybrid but failed. But the CR-Z and Insight will help us enhance awareness that Honda is a green car maker. We also want to introduce the FCX to Europe and have started testing here.

Talking of green technology, what happened to the clean diesels you were working on?

It was too challenging to produce a commercialised clean diesel. We got it to work at a research and development level, but we couldn’t make it work commercially. But we haven’t abandoned clean diesel research, and we’re still working on the technology.

Honda doesn’t believe electric vehicles have much of a future, yet you are working on battery-electric cars. Why?

The performance of batteries is evolving and there are possibilities. But the energy that can be stored is less than an internal combustion engine can produce, and with current battery technology electric vehicles are city commuters. But they could be used as a second car, with an internal combustion-engined car as the first vehicle. We are in the midst of considering what can be done with an electric commuter car.

Honda has, from an early stage, worked on fuel cell vehicles. Battery EVs are heavy, not fun to drive and aren’t reliable, and when it comes to cars lighter is better. FCVs are going in that direction.

So when do you think you’ll be selling fuel cell cars?

We don’t have any plans to sell them as there isn’t a hydrogen infrastructure to support them, and they would be very expensive. Infrastructure is key to the adoption of fuel cell vehicles.

And the cost?

We can do cost reduction and mass production of the technology. It’s simple to produce fuel cells; it’s the chemicals they use that cost money, along with the precious metals. But we can cut the cost of those, too.

What’s happened to the small sub-Jazz car that was mentioned last year?

The recession has caused our business to go through difficult times, and we had to revise our business plan, which has slowed development. Our priority now is to increase sales of the Jazz in Europe. But we haven’t given up on the small car. We’d like to try it in Asia first.