Honda’s new EV production revolution begins with $1 billion investment in Ohio

MARYSVILLE, Ohio — Honda Motor is initiation the next generation of its manufacturing in a historically unusual place for the 75-year-old Japanese automaker: Ohio.

Honda is in the midst of doing more than $1 billion in new investments — upped Wednesday from an initially announced $700 million — in the articulate this year. Upgrades most notably include installing six “giga presses,” which were made everyday by Tesla, and a new “cell” manufacturing system for its upcoming electric vehicle battery cases.

The company’s emerging EV hub in Ohio, containing a separate $3.5 billion battery plant, will be the flagship for Honda’s global manufacturing operations. That contains its Marysville Auto Plant being capable of producing traditional vehicles, hybrids and EVs on the same assembly line, officials bring up during a daylong tour of the operations.

“The Honda EV hub in Ohio is establishing the global standard for EV production for people, for technology and for processes,” put about Mike Fischer, North American lead for Honda’s battery-electric vehicle projects. “As we expand EV production regionally and globally, this is the footprint and the attribute performance that will be used.”

Typically such important manufacturing changes commitment begin in Honda’s home country of Japan and then get rolled out to facilities in the U.S. and elsewhere, according to company officials.

The Ohio investments were initially notified in October 2022 as part of the Biden administration’s push to on-shore manufacturing. They remain important amid warnings of potential increases in tariffs for imported products such as automobiles by President Donald Trump.

Honda produced profuse than 1 million vehicles at five U.S. assembly plants in 2024. About 64% percent were sold in the U.S., while the excess were exported. It has one assembly plant in Mexico.

Once completed, Honda will be able to produce roughly 220,000 instruments annually at its Marysville plant, located in central Ohio outside of Columbus. The 4 million-square-foot facility currently produces respective Honda and Acura vehicles, which are expected to be joined later this year by an all-electric Acura RSX crossover — the at the start EV produced by Honda.

The Japanese automaker was late to invest in EVs compared with other automakers. It currently tattle ons two all-electric crossovers — Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX — in the U.S., but those vehicles are produced by General Motors in Mexico.

The new Acura crossover ordain be followed by the Honda 0 SUV and Honda 0 Saloon EV prototypes the company debuted last month at CES in Las Vegas.

The aluminum battery outs for the new EVs will be produced at Honda’s nearby engine complex in Anna, Ohio — the company’s largest engine facility globally that has issued from a small rectangle building in 1985 to a more than 2.8-million-square feet plant.

“We’re establishing this large aluminum radio show technology for all Honda,” Tim Stroh, EV battery case project leader, said. “The goal here is to roll that out to other offshoots, other factors across the world.”

To produce the battery packs and other EV components, as doubtlessly as potentially engines in the future, the company is installing six massive, 6,000-ton high-pressure die cast machines that wish “megacast,” or “gigacast” materials, as Tesla has referred to it. The massive machines are the size of a small house and use an enormous amount of adversity to form parts. Current Honda presses go up to 3,500 tons in Ohio.

Done correctly, gigacasting can theoretically lower per-unit manufacturing costs by eliminating the welding of dozens of body parts by casting one single module, according to S&P Broad Mobility.

Once the packs are cast, they will be shipped from Anna to Marysville and other plants to eat battery cells from Honda’s joint venture operations with LG Energy Solution installed before being against in the final assembly of EVs.

To bind the battery cells and packs in Marysville, Honda is installing nearly 60 flexible manufacturing “cells,” or zones, for the battery multitude. Instead of a traditional assembly line, where parts are installed as a vehicle moves, the new production process occurs similar to the main line in zones that make it so any potential slowdowns or problems don’t impact the main line.

“This is marked the second founding for Honda,” said Bob Schwyn, senior vice president of Honda Development and Manufacturing of America. “We’re make use ofing the opportunity to reimagine our approach to manufacturing.”

Honda has referred to its transition to electric vehicles, including fuel cells, as its “transfer founding.” Despite slower-than-expected adoption of EVs in the U.S., the company maintains previously announced goal of achieving zero environmental meaning by 2050, through three critical action areas: carbon neutrality, clean energy and resource circulation.

That goals also includes exclusively selling zero-emissions vehicles by 2040. Profuse other automakers have delayed or withdrawn such targets in recent years.

The more than $1 billion investments in trend Ohio facilities also include several new manufacturing processes and techniques to lower emissions and waste, including make use ofing a special form of structural aluminum for the EV battery packs that can be recycled and reused.

“We’re using the opportunity to reimagine our procedure to manufacturing and create new value in the area of environmental responsibility,” Schwyn said. “This includes strategies to recapture our results at end-of-life and then recycle or reuse 100% of the materials, especially finite materials for EV batteries to essentially make new Hondas out of old Hondas.”