Closing Swindon: full withdrawal from carmaking in Europe (2019)

The thirty-six years between entering and leaving

What this withdrawal put to the test was the weight of the thirty-six years separating the 1985 entry from the 2019 exit. For a long time Honda held a finished-car plant in Europe yet had to ship more than sixty percent of its output outside the region for the volumes to add up. Local production without the backing of sales piled up as low utilization, fixed costs, and finally the cost of withdrawal itself. That Honda missed the chance to tidy this up while times were good and only folded it away once forced to concentrate resources on the shift to electrification is where the lateness and the weight of this decision show through.

At the same time, this withdrawal can be read less as Honda retreating from one market called Europe than as its confronting the end of an era of building finished cars everywhere on its own. It fell within a flow, overlapping with the closure of the Sayama plant and the early-retirement offer, of narrowing the base of production with electrification in view. The self-standing in Europe that Honda had envisioned at the time of entry was never achieved; yet the experience seems to have left the electrification-era Honda with a question — how to shrink the time lag between the decision to spread bases and the decision to fold them up.