Honda Motor Co. and General Motors have been partners in a variety of efforts to improve technology and save money in the process. While some of the pairings have done well, Honda and GM have been steadily drifting apart for the past few years.
A worker at the GM-Honda fuel-cell plant in Brownstown Twp, Michigan. Honda’s just unveiled its own hydrogen fuel cell produced independently of GM.
The latest move came when Honda revealed last week it was splitting with GM to develop and produce its own hydrogen fuel systems. The split was laid bare Feb. 19 when Honda announced plans for its new fuel cell system. It came at the International Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Expo in Tokyo.
While the new technology is important in terms of its potential impact on Honda’s bottom line, it’s also one more milestone marking the slow separation between the two automotive giants. Honda’s new system improves upon the system it replaces designed and built in concert with GM.
The latest move
The soon-to-be-replaced fuel cell system is manufactured at 70,000-square-foot plant in Brownstown Township, Michigan, which is a GM-Honda joint venture that began in January 2024. The system is used in the CR-V e:FCEV, a hydrogen-powered version of the crossover produced by Honda in Marysville, Ohio.
The partners targeted output of some 2,000 systems annually for Honda. It was the centerpiece of an $85 million joint venture teaming Detroit’s General Motors and Honda Motor Co., Japan’s third-largest automaker.
But in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2028, Honda says it will begin manufacturing the new, in-house fuel cell system in Japan at a new plant being built in Moka, a city just north of Tokyo in Tochigi prefecture. The facility will be on the site of an old, unused powertrain factory.
The relationship
Honda and GM agreed to end their $5 billion partnership to develop low-priced EVs just about 18 months after they announced it.
GM and Honda teamed up on a number of different projects throughout the years, including the fuel cell partnership which began in 2013. The two sides worked together on electric vehicle batteries, leading the Detroit automaker to provide the underlying technology for the Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX battery-electric vehicles.
The $5 billion partnership to jointly develop EVs attracted plenty of attention when announced in 2021. However, no clear explanation was given when the two sides went their separate ways in the EV deal in October 2023.
“After conducting some research and analyses, both parties decided to end the development,” Honda said in a statement at the time. “Each company will continue to work towards offering affordable models to the EV market.”
The two sides pledged to play nice as the venture wound down, but Honda’s chief made it clear as to why the change was coming.
“After studying this for a year, we decided that this would be difficult as a business, so at the moment, we are ending development of an affordable EV,” Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe told Bloomberg.
The difficulty? It might have been GM’s renewed focus on profitability. The interest and sales of EVs slowed, causing the Detroit-based company to rethink — and ultimately slow — its EV product introduction cadence.
More Honda News
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- Honda Debuts New 0 Series EVs at CES
- First Drive: Hydrogen-Powered Honda CR-V e:FCEV
End of the Cruise
Both invested in San Francisco-based Cruise, the autonomous vehicle developer that GM shut down last fall, buying out the investors — including Honda — and moved all of the tech know-how in-house.
GM halted development of its Origin robocab. It bought out the investors, including Honda.
The move wasn’t a surprise given the trend of the other partnerships. GM’s support of the technology and the company began to wane in the wake of a 2023 crash involving a pedestrian and one of the company’s robotaxis.
The incident, in which the Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian to the curb, was the last in a series of problems that made it difficult to go forward with Cruise as it was currently configured. After an attempted relaunch last April, the company was closed down — after a $10 billion investment.
Some analysts wondered why GM exited the potentially profitable robocab segment. But others fear the operation was permanently damaged by the crash.
Either way, this week’s move underscores CEO Barra’s reputation for walking away from operations that continue to roll up deficits. She has pulled General Motors out of a number of money-losing markets, including Europe, Russia and India.
The new move
For its its part, Honda’s not sitting around, playing the role of the spurned wife. The new hydrogen engine represents and important step forward the automaker.
“The Honda Next Generation Fuel Cell Module unveiled today is being independently developed by Honda as a successor to the current model Honda jointly developed with General Motors (GM),” Honda officials noted in a release last week.
2025 Honda CR-V eFCEV is adding a new dimension to green vehicle segment.
In addition to achieving a rated output of 150 kW, the Honda Next Generation Fuel Cell Module will feature half of the production cost and more than double the durability compared to the current model. Moreover, the module was downsized by increasing the volumetric power density*1 by more than three times, which increased the flexibility of installation layouts.
By further expanding domains for application of the system and sales regions of this next-generation fuel cell module, Honda is striving to make a greater contribution to the realization of a sustainable, energy-oriented society.
Big hydrogen
While many think of hydrogen fuel cells being used to power vehicles and semi trucks, they’re also in a variety of other applications, such as large-scale generators. GM uses them not only as mobile power generators, but also at various points in the same capacity on its various campuses across the U.S.
Honda intends to do the same with the new purely Honda model.
The Honda Fuel Cell Power Generator, scheduled for mass production in 2026, is a stationary power storage system capable of supplying hydrogen-derived, clean electricity to large facilities such as factories and offices. It utilizes the fuel cell also being used for the Honda CR-V e:FCEV fuel cell vehicle.
The compact size of the new generator came about through by redesigning cooling system. The new internal layout enables flexible fit to the installation environments of each customer.
Mobility is important, but so too is the ability to use it quickly to provide highly reliable backup power. Honda’s new fuel cell generator is being developed to feature high responsiveness that enables it to begin supplying power within 10 seconds of startup.
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