I don't fundamentally disagree with anything you've said here. In fact many of your points are the reasons we've been ride-or-die Honda for decades. Beyond anything, we prioritize reliability above almost every other metric (with reliability to mean "doesn't break at all" not "easy to repair" -- though the second meaning also applies here).

But to be honest, I don't really care about their small engine prowess, or motorcycle business. I really need great, ultra-reliable, reasonably-priced, four-wheel mobility -- and thought Honda has always been somewhat conservative in their offerings in many ways, one could always think that the strategy was simply Honda wanting to make anything they put in their cars as reliable as possible.

When Hyundai was putting in electric window shades and cup coolers and radars and TVs in their cars, Honda put a simple camera in the passenger-side mirror and displayed some lines to help the driver estimate distances on their own to make lane changes safer. It was simple, effective, basically bug free. I could really appreciate that sort of practical, conservative, thoughtful, engineering.

But I think they're veering from that. These competencies really seem to have ossified as the company has struggled to figure out where to go next. For example, the Honda e showed really beautiful visual design, but had poor specs, and was so expensive almost nobody bought it -- it never made sense as a product and showed almost none of Honda's talent for conservative consumer vehicle design. It didn't even last 4 years as an entire vehicle line and only moved like 12,000 units globally without ever even making it to the U.S. market. It was previewed at trade shows for longer than it was an entire vehicle line. In any line-up against competitor vehicles, there was no reason to buy it, and that's what the market did. There just wasn't really any of that Honda DNA in this vehicle.

The thing is, the Koreans today are also exploring LPG and Hydrogen, but they're also bringing to market a steady stream of everything else, and those offerings are competitive in the market. Toyota is also doing these things minus highly competent EVs.

But here is where Honda really lost me [1]. Why would Honda, a company who's brand is "highly reliable and competent engineering" sign a strategic partnership with GM who's brand is "large and fading U.S. car company that builds cheaply built and unreliable cars that people buy because of fleet deals with car rental companies and local police forces". This just tells me that Honda:

1 - Doesn't know who they are anymore, they've lost their brand self-awareness

2 - Can't get their engineering department to figure out EV technology on their own, their engineering competency is diminishing

The thing is, the Koreans have done it, from making highly unreliable mobile scrap piles 25 years ago, they now nip at the heels of Toyota and VW, while offering well designed, reasonably reliable products in basically every category (including EVs, LPG, Hydrogen, iCE, Hybrid, Plug-in Hybrid, small cars to buses) and their products are also moving in the market and finding customers.

Honda needs to step it up, they no longer followers with other leading in new adoption, they're wallowing around, absolutely aimless and I hate it.

1 - https://news.gm.com/newsroom.detail.html/Pages/news/us/en/20...