Green Options

According to CEO Carlos Ghosn, unlike its other Japanese rivals, Nissan has made a strategic decision to cede the standalone hybrid wars to them and will not make hybrid-only models such as Toyota’s Prius or Honda’s Insight.

It seems that in the quest to sell the cheapest hybrid they possibly could — a “hybrid for everyone” as Honda’s tagline goes — Honda has majorly skimped on some truly essential bits. Have they made a critical strategic error?

As detailed in the just released August issue of Consumer Reports magazine, out of a crop of 22 small hatchbacks and wagons, the Insight — Honda’s much-touted all new Hybrid — came in 21st on the road test with one of the worst performances CR has seen from Honda in longer than many of the editors at the venerable publication can remember. The only car in that group to fare worse on the road test was the Dodge Caliber.

Seems that Honda may have vastly underestimated the appeal of their new hybrid — twice as many Honda Insights were ordered by the time the car had been on sale for ten days than Honda expected to sell in its first two months on the Japanese market.

With the world focused on fuel economy, advanced car design seems to be converging around one point in space. And I do mean, literally, a point in space — a point sometimes seen flying over Roswell, or crashing in the Bermuda triangle.

Regardless of what you think about this type of design, it begs the question: do cars need to look like alien spacecraft to get decent fuel economy?

Last month I reported on some Car & Driver spy photos that indicated Honda would be building a hybrid-only car that looked almost exactly like the Prius. Today, Honda confirmed that those spy photos were genuine — and that their designers don’t have any creativity.