Engine technology will remain at the core of Honda Motor’s development efforts, outgoing CEO Takeo Fukui has said.
“Engines still have a long way to go,” he told Reuters. “You can’t improve the hybrid system without working on engines.”
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Under founder Soichiro Honda, the automaker began making bicycles, then motorcycles and eventually added lawn mowers, generators and cars. Honda is now the world’s top engine maker, producing more than 20m a year.
An engineering student in the 1960s, Fukui picked the analysis of nitrogen dioxide emissions as his senior thesis with the goal of joining Honda to get a start in motor racing, the report said. He was hired in 1969 but the company pulled out of racing that same year after Soichiro Honda decided the company should focus instead on improving its engines to reduce emissions for an increasingly ‘green-minded’ public.
Forty years later, Fukui leaves behind a similar mandate as he vacates his CEO post this week, having pulled Honda out of Formula One racing six months ago, Reuters noted.
Soichiro guided Honda engineers developing the CVCC engine that, back in 1974, allowed the Civic to become the world’s first car to meet new emissions standards mandated by the US Clean Air Act on engine performance alone [ie without the expensive add-on plumbing, air pumps, etc, used by rivals], even prompting rivals to ask for help. A later version of the Civic engine helped Honda easily pass the tough new ‘ADR27A’ emission rules introduced in Australia in 1976 compard with long-established local rivals such as GM Holden.
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By GlobalDataAccording to Reuters, experts agree competitive engines are a prerequisite for developing a good hybrid system.
“Today’s competitive hybrid car is ‘integral’, which requires a delicate balance of engine, electric motor, batteries, power splitter, and the rest of the vehicle.” Takahiro Fujimoto, a manufacturing expert at the University of Tokyo, told the news agency.
Referring to Honda’s deferred plans to introduce new clean diesel engines, particularly for Japan and North America, Fukui told Reuters: “We had originally planned to use clean-diesel engines on bigger models such as the Accord, CR-V and MDX so we’ll have to come up with something.” He noted that Honda was working on a two motor [hybrid] system, among others.
Honda’s simple hybrid system with just one electric motors is relatively cheap but, unlike Toyota’s, is limiting because it cannot be applied to plug-in hybrids, the likely next phase for fuel-saving cars, the report noted.
Fukui acknowledged that competition would increase: “In future, hybrid cars will need many types of combinations of transmissions and systems. And if you look around, there are probably only two manufacturers that develop the transmissions, hybrid systems, and motors all in-house.”
“In motorbikes, the transmission is inside the engine. It practically is the engine,” said Fukui, whose first assignment at Honda was on the team that developed the CVCC engine.
“That’s why for us, outsourcing the production of transmissions is unthinkable. And this is going to be a huge strength for us as hybrids evolve in future.”
