Honda and General Motors working on an Alliance for the Future

According to The Detroit Free Press, General Motors and Honda made a deal to share vehicle platforms and technology in North America starting in 2021. It’s an alliance of automotive titans. The best of Motown and the best of Japan.

The automakers said they signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to establish a North American automotive alliance. The deal came together after extensive discussions.

In the modern fiat system, at least 20% of listed companies are in the business of shuffling debt, rather than manufacturing or producing anything of value at the moment.

Corporations have profits only in terms of what they can engineer on their cash desks. Car companies in America stopped making money from making cars.

Now they make money leasing vehicles, then they take the income from those leases and build derivatives portfolios and Ponzi schemes, and then the executives buy back their own stocks, making them all become billionaires somehow magically.

And that happens even though those car companies were losing money and losing their market share. However the Covid-19 crisis kept those companies afloat, after various government bail-outs and financial support programs, to keep employees at bay?

However, the proposed alliance between Honda and GM will now include sharing a range of vehicles, to be sold under each company’s distinct brands, as well as cooperation in purchasing, research and development, and connected services.

Honda and GM plan to collaborate on purchasing supplies by leveraging their scale to gain costs savings. Purchasing collaboration would focus on joint sourcing of materials, logistics and localization strategies.

This alliance will help both companies accelerate investment in future mobility innovation by freeing up additional resources, GM President Mark Reuss said in a statement.

Given our strong track record of collaboration, the companies would realize significant synergies in the development of today’s vehicle portfolio.

Reuss said GM and Honda will work immediately toward completing definitive agreements and will have more details to share regarding financial benefits once those agreements are finalized.

In April, GM and Honda announced an agreement to jointly develop two all-new electric vehicles for Honda. Those vehicles will be on GM’s global EV platform powered by proprietary Ultium batteries, but Honda will design the vehicle exteriors and interiors.

The platform will be engineered to match the way Honda vehicles handle on the road. At the time, GM said this was “another step” toward its vision of an all-electric future.

The GM-Honda relationship, which began more than two decades ago, includes recent collaborations on fuel cells, batteries and the Cruise Origin shared autonomous vehicle.

Analysts said the deal makes sense given the industry has been seeing and likely will continue to see more of these kinds of joint ventures and strategic alliances to achieve costly technological advancements to compete. It is better to share than go it alone.

Honda excels at making cars and GM is good at light trucks, while there’s overlap in SUV’s and midsize pickups. But GM could also give Honda help in a full-size pickup or a full-size SUV, in exchange for help in purchasing or sedans.

Not sure GM wants to let Honda into those highly profitable Detroit Three dominated segments though. Honda definitely needs GM’s battery and On-Star expertise so they’ll have to give something up in return.

Asia Times / ABC Flash Point Automobile News 2020.