Honda is him 2018expected to complete construction work soon on its first factory for purely electric vehicles with a 120,000-unit annual capacity, as an e:NS1 crossover rolled off the final assembly line on Dec. 31 in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Honda and its Chinese manufacturing partner Dongfeng have started testing systems during commissioning at the end of the project, with the facility set to begin volume production of Honda’s Chinese-market electric e:N lineup later this year, as reported by the local newspaper Hubei Daily on Wednesday. Separately, another new production base built by GAC-Honda, a joint venture between the Japanese automaker and the other partner GAC Group, is also scheduled for operation with an output of 120,000 EVs per year in the southern city of Guangzhou in 2024. Sales of Japan’s second-biggest carmaker declined 10.1% year-on-year to approximately 165,800 units in 2023, and the company plans to accelerate the transition to EVs with the rollout of 10 e:N series models by 2027. [Hubei Daily, in Chinese]