Luxury carmaker Acura says it plans to follow a different route to electrification than parent company Honda. The company’s Assistant VP of Sales for the U.S. Emile Korker confirmed in a discussion with Automotive News this week that the company will not produce any hybrid models and instead move straight to producing all-electric models. This means it will move faster towards being a full-on electric brand than its parent company.
“For Acura, we’re going much faster than the Honda brand in terms of our transition to electric vehicles as a percentage of sales. We’re going to bypass hybrids altogether. So our shift is going very rapidly into BEV. That’s our main focus.”
- Emile Korkor, to Automotive News
Acura is no stranger to hybrid technology, having produced electrified version of the MDX SUV and the RLX sedan, but a look at the current lineup shows nothing hybrid at all, save for the NSX supercar. As for the upcoming Integra, it will a gasoline-engine-only product. Earlier this year, Acura executives explained that before it could turn to electrification, the company had to re-establish its position as Honda’s performance division. Hence the Integra.
While Honda has said that it plans to have 40 percent of its sales consist of electric vehicles by 2030, Acura’s go-fast strategy will, the company believes, put it on track to attain 60 percent of sales be EVs by the same deadline.
The first model out of the gate will come in 2024 in the form of an electric crossover, which will actually be built by GM using its Ultium platform (also used for the Hummer EV and the Cadillac Lyriq). That crossover will be accompanied onto the market by a smaller counterpart under the Honda banner, already announced and which will take the name Prologue.
For other future electric models, Acura will likely make use of the EV-specific e-Architecture platform Honda has developed for its own EVs to come.
But as mentioned, all of that will happen after one last blast of nostalgia with the debut of the sporty new Integra next year.