My Car Yokomasu Battery

10/04/2026

Honda's CEO walked into a Chinese car factory in Shanghai in late February. He walked out and said: "We have no chance against this." That quote is now reshaping everything Honda does next. 😳

Honda President Toshihiro Mibe visited a fully automated automotive supplier facility in Shanghai — a factory with no humans on the production floor. Every function, from parts procurement to logistics management, was automated. The facility also supplies Tesla in the United States. What Mibe saw wasn't just automation — it was the compound effect of automation, supply chain integration, and development speed operating simultaneously. Chinese automakers currently develop a new vehicle in 18 to 24 months — roughly half the time Honda and most traditional manufacturers require.

The numbers behind the shock are brutal. Honda's China sales have collapsed from 1.62 million units in 2020 to 640,000 in 2025 — a 60% decline in five years. Factory utilisation has fallen to approximately 50% — far below the 70–80% threshold required for profitability. Honda's own automotive segment posted an operating loss of ¥73 billion ($468 million) in the April–September 2025 half-year period, compared to a ¥258 billion ($1.6 billion) profit in the same period the year before. The visit didn't reveal a future problem. It confirmed a present one.

Honda's response is structural and immediate. The company is reviving Honda R&D as an independent entity — reversing a centralisation decision made years earlier — and reassigning thousands of engineers into the newly independent unit to restore development speed and innovation autonomy. The planned Honda 0 Series EVs slated for Ohio production in 2026 have been cancelled. In their place, Honda is building its upcoming 0 Alpha EV in India to reduce cost exposure. Ford, Toyota, and Nissan are raising identical alarms simultaneously — Toyota's CFO warned "we will not survive" without fundamental restructuring. The CEO of Honda said it more directly, on the factory floor, in February.

31/03/2026

26/03/2026

China may have just uncovered one of the largest gold deposits on Earth, and it’s worth an estimated $83 billion.

At least on paper.

Geologists in Hunan province have identified a massive underground reserve, with early drilling showing hundreds of tons of high-grade gold. Some projections suggest it could exceed 1,000 tons, which would put it among the biggest ever discovered.

But here’s the catch.

Most of it is still buried extremely deep underground, in some cases several kilometres down. That makes it far harder and more expensive to extract. And the $83 billion figure is based on current gold prices, not actual mined output.

It’s a huge discovery. Potentially historic.

But for now, it’s still mostly theoretical gold sitting deep beneath the surface.