Honda plans to invest $11 billion, with the help of joint venture partners, to build out its electric vehicle efforts in Canada as it prepares for future demand in North America for the automobiles.

The company said Thursday that it has started evaluating the requirements to build an EV plant and a separate EV battery plant in Ontario. It already has two manufacturing plants there that have 4,200 employees. Honda expects to add at least 1,000 more workers for the two new facilities.

The EV plant, once fully operational, will have a production capacity of 240,000 EVs per year and the battery plant will have a capacity of 36 GWh per year.

There's also plans for a cathode active material and precursor processing plant through a joint venture partnership with POSCO Future M Co. and a separator plant through a joint venture partnership with Asahi Kasei Corp.

Honda Motor Co. anticipates EV production will start in 2028.

Last month Nissan and Honda announced that they would work together in developing electric vehicles and auto intelligence technology.

The world's automakers are rapidly shifting toward electric vehicles, focusing on batteries and motors instead of gas engines, as concerns grow about emissions and climate change.

But Japanese automakers have fallen behind rivals such as Tesla of the U.S. and BYD of China in developing EVs, partly because they have historically been so successful with combustion engine vehicles.

Elsewhere in the sector, Toyota announced Thursday that it will invest $1.4 billion in its Princeton, Indiana plant to produce a battery electric SUV. The move will create up to 340 jobs. The automaker recently announced that it would invest $1.3 billion to produce a separate battery electric SUV at its Kentucky facility.