Honda Motor will not cooperate with rival automakers as it seeks to boost its presence in Asia, a top executive said.

A variety of automakers are exploring ways to share vehicle underpinnings and components to lower R&D spending as competition intensifies with the spread of cheaper and more fuel-efficient cars.

Fumihiko Ike, head of Honda’s Asia & Oceania operations, told Reuters the carmaker would shun such partnerships after its past experience with a short-lived capital tie-up with Rover in the 1990s and an engine supply deal with General Motors in the past decade.

“Pursuing bigger volumes is certainly one way of lowering costs,” he told the news agency on Tuesday.

“But in reality making cars isn’t that simple. It’s very difficult for two companies to work together towards a common goal. On paper you might end up with the volumes, but in other ways you get huge inefficiencies,” he said.

Ike, formerly Honda’s chief financial officer, said working quickly alone could be more beneficial than gaining economies of scale through a tie-up. Developing key technologies in-house was expensive but also desirable, he said, as it enables carmakers to work in conjunction with suppliers to lower parts costs.

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“The key now is figuring out how to efficiently develop and produce cars. And if the company becomes too big, efficiencies will also fall,” he said.

Honda, like most carmakers, is developing its own small car to occupy the segment below the Fit/Jazz subcompact, with sales in India, a popular growth market occupied or being entered by most automakers, expected to start in 2011.

But volumes are expected to be small, at a combined 100,000 for India, Thailand and neighbouring markets, raising questions as to how competitive the car could be against rival mass-volume models from Nissan, Hyundai Motor and others.

Honda has said the new small car in India would be priced below INR500,000 (US$11,000), putting it at the high end of the small car segment.

Overall car sales in the Asia-Pacific region excluding Japan and China jumped two-thirds in the past decade to 6.95m vehicles in 2009, fuelled largely by motorisation in India. Ike told Reuters he expected the region’s car market to grow about 6% this year, adding he hoped Honda would post a similar rise.

Hyundai is the top seller in the region with 1.37m vehicles last year, followed by Toyota and Suzuki with about 1m cars each. Honda ranks fourth with sales of 348,000 cars.

Ike said Honda was holding Hyundai up as a benchmark as it develops its new small car using more local parts, adding that the South Korean automaker was a formidable player in the industry.

“Hyundai’s vehicle line-up is exceptionally broad, they’re competitive on price and quality is solid. Their cars are everywhere in the world,” he told Reuters. “There’s no question we’re benchmarking them for this new car.”