Honda's commercials saying they are going to be carbon neutral by 2050. What?
What does this mean, if anything? How would it be possible for a car company to be carbon neutral? Is this just nonsense/posturing since it’s so long from now?
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There will for sure be some "Creativity" with their numbers.
"Carbon Neutral" will only apply to the manufacturing of the product, not the life of the product.
It will probably also only apply to the assembly that is done in-house. It might not apply to things like the tires.
It will also probably be done through some bulllshit "carbon credits", which are about as honest and reliable as those "no, our $2 chocolate definitely didn't use any child labour, and the farmers definitely aren't paid slave-wages." badges you find on foods.
Similar to how Subaru brags about their "zero landfill" production. Manufacturing a car absolutely generates waste. They just juggle the supply chain to have all the waste happen at their suppliers.
Zero landfill is not zero trash. It's just that the waste has to be recyclable or incinerated.
"But their comment is still likely true and they're offloading anything not recyclable onto their suppliers, heh.
But what waste do they have that they wouldn't want to eliminate for production reasons? They assemble cars from parts they buy. A lot of times these parts come from smaller machine shops. A pallet of parts comes in, it gets out on the car, pallet returns to the supplier for the next load. I'm not sure why people are confused here. It's not like they want the parts to be individually packaged.
Caveat: I'm not a manufacturing expert but I have met some of these machine shop people.
As someone who has a client who is an automotive OEM (I work with Customs and Imports), most of the parts are made by suppliers, who use parts from other suppliers, and barely anything is done in-house except maybe final assembly, so your comment totally tracks.
It’s suppliers all the way down LOL.
Ah this makes sense. Seems like they are trying to say Honda’s impact on the planet will be carbon neutral, which seems impossible.
Honda: WE'RE carbon neutral, but if you drive one of our cars, that's on you.
Presumably by 2050 any new cars they sell will be electric. I don't see anyone selling a ton of ICE cars at that stage except for niche applications (and they can easily spin that off into a different company if needed for carbon accounting purposes).
Seeing at how bad Japanese car manufacturers are at producing good electric cars, and how they may be replaced by Chinese companies, maybe they mean they’ll be bankrupt by 2050… :P
I wouldn’t say they’re bad at it, just playing catch-up after they bet on the wrong technologies.
Toyota was the first to sell a usable hybrid back when BEV battery tech wasn’t there yet; Honda bet on hydrogen fuel cell tech.
When it turned out everyone was going with the Tesla BEV concept, Honda and Toyota were already mid-development lifecycle with investments in technologies that didn’t make the cut.
Now that those lifecycles are starting to wind down, we’ll see of they can leapfrog the current designs for BEVs to come up with the next big thing before China or Korea beats them to it.
Honestly, I think hybrids are the least environmentally damaging of the 3 main car types. Mining lithium is extemely environmentally destructive, and we're going to see the consequences of that in the coming years as full EVs continue to explode in popularity. Hybrids use a fraction of the lithium if EVs and produce a fraction of the emissions of full ICEs. I really don't understand why hybrids aren't being pushed more until better, sustainable and scalable battery tech is discovered.
You assume they are even going to justify the bare minimum... it is so far in the future they are just hoping everyone will forget about it.