July 2, 2026 - Honda Follows Industry Pivot to Energy Storage

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for July 2, 2026, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry. 

Several years ago, as part of its plan to create an electric vehicle production hub in central Ohio, Honda decided to retool two of its assembly plants, produce large-scale castings for battery cases and create a cell production factory in partnership with LG Energy Solution. When we visited some of those plants in spring 2025, all of these plants were ready and doing pilot production. However, in January of this year, before volume production of the Acura RSX, the first of four scheduled vehicles began, Honda canceled its entire North American EV program, including the Afeela joint venture with Sony. 

Between 2020 and 2024, automakers and battery cell suppliers announced plans for more than two dozen cell production facilities across North America in anticipation of a huge ramp-up of EV production this decade. But then it all fell apart with bad product plans from automakers and a war on all green technologies by the second Trump administration. Several of the proposed cell plants were cancelled, but most have actually been completed, with many of them now producing cells. It's just that most of those cells aren't going to EVs as automakers and cell producers have pivoted hard toward stationary energy storage. LG Energy Solution was among the first, cancelling plans to produce EV cells at its Holland, Michigan, plant expansion and producing lithium iron phosphate cells for energy storage instead. LG has or had joint ventures with several automakers, including GM, Stellantis, and Honda. The GM joint venture plant in Spring Hill, Kentucky, is now also going to supply LFP cells to LG to assemble into containerized storage batteries. This week, Honda has launched production at its plant in Jeffersonville, Ohio, that it will provide to LG. 

The explosion in construction of massive AI data centers is what's driving most of the demand right now, with these facilities requiring enormous amounts of reliable power and LFP energy storage is perfectly suited for this. It's estimated that by 2030, there will be demand for 110 GWh per year of these systems, and even if data center construction slows, there are a lot of other facilities, including solar and wind farms, that can utilize the storage. Once EV production begins to ramp back up, these same facilities can also be utilized to produce batteries for vehicles, so at least that capital investment in batteries isn't going to waste. 

Thanks for listening.