What's all this then?

Honda has committed to a rapid expansion of its electric and hybrid car offerings in Europe, having fallen well behind the competition. The Japanese company has recently been focusing on its hydrogen fuel cell efforts, and has brought its new Clarity fuel cell car to Geneva, which has a claimed best-in-class one-tank range of 700km. For a company that launched the first ever-hybrid (the Insight), Honda has ignored electric car developments and models such as the Civic Hybrid and second-generation Insight have disappeared. In Geneva, though, Honda Europe's President and COO, Katsushi Inoue, promised that his company "will leverage Honda's global R&D resources to accelerate the introduction of a full portfolio of advanced, electrified powertrains for the European customer."

Honda will back that promise up next year with the launch of a new hybrid model that will use a twin-motor system for improved efficiency. The company reckons that by 2025, two thirds of all cars sold in Europe will either be full-electric, a hybrid or plugin hybrid.

The announcement of the electric vehicle strategy for Europe comes just weeks after Honda was confirmed as the fastest growing mainstream car brand in the region in 2016. The full-year data from European industry body, ACEA, shows that total sales for Honda in EU and EFTA countries in 2016 were 159,126 units to the end of December, an increase of 20.8 per cent per cent compared to the same period in 2015. Honda's growth significantly outpaced the results for the EU passenger car market as a whole, which saw a year-on-year increase of 6.8 per cent.

Honda also brought along the little NeuV semi-autonomous concept car, shown in Las Vegas earlier this year, to Geneva. A concept of a city-based runabout, it uses a special emotion-reading computer system to better understand its driver and to make helpful hints when you're running late. Bet someone puts a fist through that by 2025...

Neil Briscoe - 7 Mar 2017