Challenge for Sustainable Carbon Free Mobility and Society: Honda's Multi-Pathways Approaching Concept with Electrified Power Unit Technologies

Authors

E. Kimura, K. Aikawa, D. Yasuda, Honda R&D Co., Ltd. Automobile Center, Tochigi, Japan;
H. Saeki, T. Brachmann, S. Barth, Honda R&D Europe (Deutschland) GmbH, Offenbach

Year

2020

Print Info

Fortschritt-Berichte VDI, Reihe 12, Nr. 813

Summary

Facing recent environmental issues, such as global warming, air pollution, and energy/resource issues, auto industries encounters a severe decade requiring significantly fast mobility style transformation with electrification and de-fossilization.
Honda announced its 2030 vision with “Serve people worldwide with the “Joy” of expanding their life's potential”, with providing our wide variety of power units, not only in automotive area, but motorcycle, power products and jet for aviation. To targeting carbon free society with our wide variety of products, it is our responsibility to ensure best-balanced allocation of energy carriers and power units both in transportation and everyday lives with extensive considerations of connecting all mobility sectors.
There is no single solution being the key accelerating towards carbon free mobility.
Honda's “multi-pathways” concept, that means not only challenging to encourage to drive towards the electrified society, but challenging to reduce GHG emission with research & development of advanced electrified power units utilizing various types of renewable energy carriers like bio-fuel, hydrogen and e-fuels considering to meet customer requirements and acceptance region by region.
In other words, automotive industries' responsibility is to prepare and provide “the right power unit” in “the right place” for “the right application” by providing “the right renewable energy carriers”, targeting minimization of GHG emission and maximizing people’s joy of mobility and their lives potential.
This paper describes, taking Honda’s energy based analysis and comparison from well to wheel or LCA viewpoint into account, how Honda will challenge such hurdles with Honda's electrified technology line up enhancement, improving such electrified technology more and more, from xHEV, BEV, FCV, technology enhancement, Honda's electrified small mobility approach with connected energy management network, maximizing renewable energy utilization, and maintaining convenience.
In this paper, such challenges and activities will be introduced and discussed, with pointing out what automotive industry should address to sustain mobility and society in the future, and at the same time securing survival of itself as automotive industry and Honda specifically.