honda

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Honda and Nissan to merge, Honda will take the lead

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In 2019, then-head of the alliance Carlos Ghosn was arrested by Japanese police on charges of financial misconduct. After three months under house arrest, Ghosn fled the country and Japan’s criminal justice system, which rarely returns a not guilty verdict.

What about Renault, Mitsubishi?

Last year, Nissan agreed to invest $663 million into Renault’s EV activities; at the same time Renault gave up the majority of its shares in Nissan, reducing the stake of each company owned by the other, down to 15 percent. That was meant to lead to “a broader range of EV products and powertrains,” said Uchida at the time. But evidently it was decided that this arrangement was not sufficient to improve Nissan’s electric vehicle portfolio.

For its part, Mitsubishi says it will monitor the situation and decide whether or not to join at a later date. Meanwhile Renault said in a statement that “as the main shareholder of Nissan, Renault Group will consider all options based on the best interest of the Group and its stakeholders. Renault Group continues to execute its strategy and to roll-out projects that create value for the Group, including projects already launched within the Alliance.”

Assuming nothing throws a spanner in these particular works, the deal will be finalized by next June, with the new holding company for the two OEMs created by August 2026. Honda will take the lead of the new enterprise, in large part thanks to its larger market capitalization. But Mibe said that any real payoff from the merger wouldn’t be realized until after 2030. The hope is that shared development costs and greater purchasing scale will help drive down costs, but both companies will continue existing partnerships such as that between Honda-GM as well.

We can expect more shared vehicle platforms between Honda and Nissan, as well as deeper cooperation at the R&D stage. But there are also plans to optimize manufacturing, including facilities, as well as integrating supply chains and even sales financing to find cost savings and efficiencies.

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Automakers excoriated by Senators for fighting right-to-repair

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Yesterday, US Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Joshua Hawley (R-MO) sent letters to the heads of Ford, General Motors, and Tesla, as well as the US heads of Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen, excoriating them over their opposition to the right-to-repair movement.

“We need to hit the brakes on automakers stealing your data and undermining your right-to-repair,” said Senator Merkley in a statement to Ars. “Time and again, these billionaire corporations have a double standard when it comes to your privacy and security: claiming that sharing vehicle data with repair shops poses cybersecurity risks while selling consumer data themselves. Oregon has one of the strongest right-to-repair laws in the nation, and that’s why I’m working across the aisle to advance efforts nationwide that protect consumer rights.”

Most repairs aren’t at dealerships

The Senators point out that 70 percent of car parts and services currently come from independent outlets, which are seen as trustworthy and providing good value for money, “while nearly all dealerships receive the worst possible rating for price.”

OEMs and their tier-one suppliers restricting the supply of car parts to within their franchised dealership networks also slows down the entire repair process for owners as well as increasing the cost of getting one’s car fixed, the letter states.

As Ars noted recently, more than one in five automotive recalls are now fixed with software patches, and increasingly the right-to-repair fight has centered on things digital—access to diagnostics, firmware, and connected services. The percentage of non-hardware recall fixes will surely grow in the coming years as more and more automakers replace older models with software-defined vehicles.

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One of the major sellers of detailed driver behavioral data is shutting down

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Products driving products —

Selling “hard braking event” data seems less lucrative after public outcry.

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Interior of car with different aspects of it highlighted, as if by a camera or AI

Getty Images

One of the major data brokers engaged in the deeply alienating practice of selling detailed driver behavior data to insurers has shut down that business.

Verisk, which had collected data from cars made by General Motors, Honda, and Hyundai, has stopped receiving that data, according to The Record, a news site run by security firm Recorded Future. According to a statement provided to Privacy4Cars, and reported by The Record, Verisk will no longer provide a “Driving Behavior Data History Report” to insurers.

Skeptics have long assumed that car companies had at least some plan to monetize the rich data regularly sent from cars back to their manufacturers, or telematics. But a concrete example of this was reported by The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, in which drivers of GM vehicles were finding insurance more expensive, or impossible to acquire, because of the kinds of reports sent along the chain from GM to data brokers to insurers. Those who requested their collected data from the brokers found details of every trip they took: times, distances, and every “hard acceleration” or “hard braking event,” among other data points.

While the data was purportedly coming from an opt-in “Smart Driver” program in GM cars, many customers reported having no memory of opting in to the program or believing that dealership salespeople activated it themselves or rushed them through the process. The Mozilla Foundation considers cars to be “the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy,” given the overly broad privacy policies owners must agree to, extensive data gathering, and general lack of safeguards or privacy guarantees available for US car buyers.

GM quickly announced a halt to data sharing in late March, days after the Times’ reporting sparked considerable outcry. GM had been sending data to both Verisk and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, the latter of which is not signaling any kind of retreat from the telematics pipeline. LexisNexis’ telematics page shows logos for carmakers Kia, Mitsubishi, and Subaru.

Ars contacted LexisNexis for comment and will update this post with new information.

Disclosure of GM’s stealthily authorized data sharing has sparked numerous lawsuits, investigations from California and Texas agencies, and interest from Congress and the Federal Trade Commission.

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These are Honda’s concepts for its new family of EVs due in 2026

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that’s more like it —

A production car based on the Saloon should go on sale in the US in two years.

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A futuristic-looking concept car called the Honda Saloon

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

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.

  • Just the other day, someone was lamenting the lack of cool-looking concepts.

    Honda

  • Honda says it will use posture control, derived from its robotics know-how, to assist the driver.

    Honda

  • How will it look when it’s not moodily lit?

    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.

“The mobility we dream of is not an extension of the trend of ‘thick, heavy, but smart’ EVs,” said Toshihiro Mibe, global CEO of Honda. “We will create a completely new value from zero based on thin, light, and wise as the foundation for our new Honda 0 EV series to further advance the joy and freedom of mobility to the next level.”

Honda says it wants to bring the “joy of driving” to EVs, which it plans to deliver through new steer-by-wire and handling algorithms, perhaps similar to the way Ferrari programs its cars to flatter and enthuse their drivers.

“We have gone back to basics and formulated the Honda 0 Series with a design for the new era,” said Honda global EVP Shinji Aoyama. “A bold and pure proportion that from the first glance is overwhelmingly different from other EVs to evoke a new perspective for people.”

  • Does the Space-Hub preview a new Honda minivan?

    Honda

  • A big glasshouse means the Space-Hub is a good place to stargaze.

    Honda

Honda’s second concept is called the Space-Hub, and with any luck, it signals a future for the minivan, itself an endangered species. There should be no packaging constraints here—instead, Honda says the Space-Hub can be configured to a range of different uses, with big windows that connect “people with each other and the outside world.”

Honda has even gone to the trouble of designing a new “H” logo for the 0 Series—the outstretched hands represent “Honda’s commitment to expand the possibilities of mobility and continue to meet the needs of its customers,” we’re told.

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