“Our car sales have declined 11% so far this year and the new car assembly plant we built is now idle,” says Carlos Eiji, chief executive of the company's power generation unit Honda Energia.

Since 2011, Honda has invested R$107.5m ($30.7m) in the 27MW Xangri-lá wind plant in the southern-most state of Rio Grande do Sul to supply its 120,000 unit-per-year assembly plant in São Paulo.