Honda Delays Canadian Manufacturing Project

It seems like these days automakers are not only idling factories, but also putting off expansion projects. Just such a development has come from Honda before it launched into a $15 billion CAD EV manufacturing campus. Now it seems not everyone agrees on why the automaker made this move.

Honda suffers a huge financial blow.

That campus was supposed to be in Ontario with not only a battery plant but also an electric vehicle assembly factory onsite. There’s already an assembly facility there, which employs 4,200 people. But the expansion would’ve resulted in 1,000 new jobs, so Ontario was pretty excited, until Honda pulled the plug.

In about two years, Honda is supposed to revisit the project and assess whether the market is ready to support it or not. We’ll see how that shakes out.

A spokesman for Honda Canada told The Detroit News the reason for the delay is slowing demand for electric cars. That makes sense because everyone from Tesla to GM ae seeing consumers pull back on EVs, at least for now.

But not everyone’s buying that story. In the same article from The Detroit News, Flavio Volpe, vice president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association was quoted as blaming the whole thing on President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

We have seen at least some car manufacturing transfer from Canadian to US factories already, so that doesn’t seem unreasonable.

However, other reports focused on the tariffs as the real cause of the move. Apparently, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has said he will hold accountable automakers pulling promised manufacturing out of the province, which only adds to speculation Honda really paused the project because of the tariffs.

If suddenly a similar facility pops up in Ohio or somewhere else in the US, that might prove such theories as correct.

The Toronto Star in its report on the delayed manufacturing project seemed to blame both tariffs and the cooling EV market. That might be the most accurate take of them all.

Image via Honda