Enlarge / Sony Honda Mobility will start taking orders for its AFEELA EV next year. (credit: Peter Nelson)

We're living through a period of radically shifting automotive technology. Companies are working on increasing electric vehicle range and redefining our concept of reenergizing . They're also gradually refining driver assistance technology and figuring out how to make vehicles an extension of their drivers.

Sony Honda Mobility's (SHM) main aim with its AFEELA luxury-tier sedan concept is to put the emphasis on the latter. The dynamic duo's website is filled with marketing buzzwords, but what is the concept actually like in person?

Recently, I was invited by SHM to check out AFEELA firsthand. It's still very much a prototype, so certain key information like price, range, and charging times weren't disclosed. But it was still worthwhile to see how these two Japanese institutions put their know-how into this spacious sedan.

Enlarge / Honda is investing CAD$15 billion (US $11 billion) to expand EV manufacturing in North America with four sites in Ontario, Canada. (credit: Honda)

Honda announced today that it will spend $11 billion to expand its electric vehicle manufacturing presence in North America. The Japanese automaker already has a number of factories in the US, Mexico, and Canada, and it's this last one that will benefit from the expansion, with four EV-related plants planned for Ontario.

Honda says it has begun evaluating requirements for what it's calling an "innovative and environmentally responsible" EV factory and a standalone EV battery plant in Alliston, Ontario, which is already home to Honda's two existing Canadian manufacturing facilities.

Additionally, the automaker wants to set up another two sites as joint ventures. One will be a plant that processes cathode active materials and their precursors—the various elements like nickel and manganese that are combined with lithium in lithium-ion batteries—set up in a partnership with POSCO Future M, a South Korean battery material and chemical company. (POSCO is already working with General Motors on another joint venture battery precursor material facility in Betancour, Quebec, that is supposed to become operational in 2026.)

Enlarge / We still think hydrogen fuel cells make more sense for static generators like the ones in the background, but Honda decided to make a fuel cell-powered CRV. (credit: Honda)

Hydrogen as a fuel source for light passenger vehicles is a tough sell in the US. It has a woefully underdeveloped refueling infrastructure in the US, being almost nonexistent outside of California, and even there, retail hydrogen stations are closing down . And hydrogen prices fluctuate like crazy, with recent costs hitting $33 per kilogram, when you can even get it. In short, it seems like a weird time for a company to introduce a new hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, but that's just what Honda is doing with its awkwardly named CR-V e:FCEV.

The fuel cell CR-V is unique in a few ways that make it interesting, the biggest of which is that it's effectively a plug-in hybrid, only instead of an internal combustion engine being paired with an electric drivetrain, this has a fuel cell powering a 17.7 kWh battery pack and a traction motor that bears more resemblance to one you'd find in an EV than in a traditional PHEV. Cool, right?

The biggest question that we have is simply why?

Enlarge / The passenger airbag in some new Hondas and Acuras is very advanced and designed to prevent brain injuries. But a faulty sensor in the seat of some cars means it might deploy when it's not supposed to. (credit: Honda)

Honda is recalling more than 750,000 vehicles manufactured between 2020 and 2022. Honda says that a weight sensor, which is meant to disable the passenger airbags if the seat is occupied by a child or child seat, might not work properly, allowing the airbags to deploy during a crash.

Exposure to humidity can cause a capacitor in the sensor to crack and leak, making it inoperable. The problem has been traced to a change in the base material for the sensor's printed circuit board—Honda's tier 1 supplier made the change when a natural disaster disrupted production at the tier 2 supplier that normally provided the base material. The changed circuit board was not properly verified and "could allow additional strain to the printed circuit board that can lead to a capacitor cracking and an internal short circuit."

A warranty claim in August 2020 was Honda's first inkling that it had a problem. Initial investigations turned up little, but the automaker kept receiving warranty claims and in January 2024 decided to issue a recall. In total it says it has had 3,834 warranty claims for this issue between June 2020 and January 2024.

Enlarge / Anode and cathode "inks" are applied to carbon-fiber paper. (credit: GM/Honda)

BROWNSTOWN, Mich.—Today, a joint venture between General Motors and Honda Motor Company, named Fuel Cell System Manufacturing LLC (FCSM LLC), officially started producing its one and only product—a fuel cell system—on a commercial scale. FCSM officially began in January of 2017 with an initial investment between GM and Honda of $85,000,000. Now, the 70,000-square-foot (6,500 m2) facility in Brownstown, Michigan, houses 80 employees and enough robots, clean rooms, and all sorts of high-tech equipment to make Ironman blush.

FCSM managing to build fuel cells quickly, reliably, and cost effectively is what's new here, not the fuel cells themselves. And, according to Tetsuo Suzuki, vice president of FCSM LLC, that proved the biggest challenge. "Our fuel cell system consists of more than 300 individual cells [307 in total], each cell is composed of very expensive materials. If there is a defect in even one cell, the entire stack would be unusable," Suzuki said. "Therefore, we designed all of our mass production processes with a zero-defect mindset." Adding, "We introduced quality control into every process."

This is the assembly line. (credit: GM/Honda)

How to build a fuel cell

More specifically, each cell consists of several parts, starting with two different liquids that FCSM calls "inks." One ink forms an anode, the other, a cathode. FCSM then pours each liquid onto a carbon-fiber paper, which it then heats to dry. It then precisely cuts these two different papers into shape and bonds them together to form what it calls a unitized electrode assembly, or UEA; the cathode on one side, the anode on the other. Both of the anode and cathode sheets are black, but the cathode sheet is gloss, and the anode sheet is matte.

Enlarge / Honda says a production version of this car will go on sale in 2026. (credit: Honda)

The global auto show might be in decline, but at least fans of futuristic cars still have CES. Today, Honda unveiled a pair of concepts in Las Vegas that it says preview a new range of electric vehicles. Called the Honda 0 series, the first of these new EVs is due to go on sale here in the US in 2026.

That car will be based on the Saloon, a sedan-ish car that looks like it just teleported in from Neo Tokyo. Some of the Saloon's details might get watered down by the inevitable compromises of road legality regulations, but fans of the sedan should take comfort in its name—"saloon" is what they call one of those in Britain.

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  Just the other day, someone was lamenting the lack of cool-looking concepts. [credit: Honda ]

The low-slung form factor is increasingly out of style these days due to a confluence of factors that now includes the difficulty in packaging a slab of batteries into something that isn't crossover-shaped. But that appears to have been taken as something of a challenge by the automaker.