Honda teases new electric vehicle ahead of China auto show

Honda has quietly announced that it will unveil a new electric vehicle at the upcoming 2020 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition (Auto China 2020).

The Japanese car maker has just one production electric vehicle – the Honda e, that it will launch on October 30, 2020. The new announcement suggests at least one more electric model, and social media comments suggest there may be more.

The confirmed vehicle – either a sedan or a SUV – will (at first at least) only be made for the Chinese market.

The image shared by Honda in its announcement about Auto China 2020, which will take place in Beijing from September 30 – October 5, 2020, is of a sharp, angular nose far removed from the cutesy image of the Honda e.

A Facebook post accompanying the announcement revealed that there will be more electric vehicles on show in Beijing, suggesting that there could be more than just one electric vehicle in the works.

“At the Honda four-wheel booth, we will exhibit the first plugin hybrid model CR-V PHEV and various electric models, new mass production models, and more as a Chinese Honda,” the car maker said (translated from Japanese).

Honda has not released any other details of the new electric car concept, only to say that it is for now a concept that will guide “direction of the future mass-production model “.

A direction that one would hope is more ambitious than the Honda’s plan for the Honda e: in a release via Honda’s Japanese website in August, the car maker said it is only planning to make 1,000 Honda e electric cars for the Japanese market per year.

While interest for the Honda e in Europe was put at 40,000, and production of 10,000 a year planned for that market as reported in Auto News in Spetember 2019, actual sales figures so far are much lower.

According to Carsalesbase, less than 700 units had been sold in the first four months after its release in April 2020

The car maker also announced that it is planning to introduce a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) version of the popular CR-V SUV, but also only for China.

In the US, Honda currently offers PHEV versions of its Clarity sedan which it introduced in 2017 superseding the PHEV Accord (it killed off the all-electric Clarity, which only had 140 or so kilometres of range, in March 2020).

It is understood that Honda has no plans to introduce the Honda e to Australia.