The old guard does not approve of the direction Honda is headed. ‘Second Founding’ of Honda not necessary when the first founding was still working.

The EV rollout disaster framing is real but the CEO refusing to resign is actually the less interesting part. What is interesting is that former executives felt comfortable enough to go public with pressure to resign at all. That does not happen at a healthy organization. That is a governance signal. The internal disagreements about EV strategy that have been papered over for two years are now surfacing publicly because the results have been bad enough long enough that people who have left feel they have nothing to lose by saying so. That dynamic does not resolve quickly regardless of who is sitting in the chair.

It's frustrating to see Honda lose its engineering edge. While the leadership bickers, competitors are eating their lunch. I’ve driven Hondas for twenty years, but their lack of a compelling, affordable electric lineup is finally making me look elsewhere. They need to deliver products, not excuses.

I'm curious how the Afeela partnership with Sony fits into this power struggle. If the CEO is betting the house on software-defined vehicles, the traditionalists would naturally freak out. This looks like a fundamental clash between hardware heritage and a digital-first future.

Afeela is dead dead dead