Honda Starts Building Spirior/Accord in China

Honda is one of the companies that are trying to benefit from the cheap labor costs in China and yesterday announced it started production of the Spirior, globally known as the Accord, at a Chinese plant. The car will be manufactured through the joint venture it has with Dongfeng in central China's Hubei province.

Gasgoo.com writes that Honda has a sales target for this year of 15,000 units for the newly-launched model which is projected to hit the market next month.

This is the third model produced by the joint venture at the Wuhan factory, following the CR-V SUV and the Civic. The factory has a production capacity of 200,000 units per year (recently increased from 120,000 cars), which raises the total Chinese output of the Japanese manufacturer to 610,000 units, including the vehicles produced by the other Honda Chinese joint venture, Guangzhou Honda.

Honda is one of the companies that spotted the potential of the Chinese market and announced in July a production boost to cope with high demand in both the local and the overseas markets. Honda will add new equipment, as well as new workers. In all, Honda's Hubei facility is capable of building, if needed, no less than 240,000 cars per year. The Japanese say that if the demand continues to rise, they will upgrade the plant to meet that goal.

According to the aforementioned source, Honda sold a total of 50,647 vehicles in China in July, which represents a 14.9 percent increase compared to the same month of the previous year. As for the first seven months of the year, the company, together with its local ventures, delivered 304,459 vehicles in the country.