shakran

Then you should call yourselves high-milers or something to distinguish, because the jackholes I describe have gotten themselves out in the media to the point that when you say hypermiler, that's what people think.




I've driven every product Honda has sold in the US since the 70's, from the CVCC Civic to the NSX. I didn't own all of them, but I've driven 'em. Yes, I've driven the insight. Three of them, in fact. Some of the drawbacks I listed about that car, I don't personally mind - the size, the 2 seats - hell, that was like being in the CRX. But the crappy handling and the acceleration of a freight train was severely underimpressive for the mileage gains, which are so few over the CRX HF. And the HF was a better car to be in, even if it did lack a passenger side mirror and a 3rd steering wheel spoke





So will an Aztek, but that doesn't mean people want to buy it, either.


Look, if you only make 3 units of something per month, and you find 6 people per month who want to buy it, you're going to have a backlog. Eventually, a big one. That doesn't mean it was massively popular - it only means they made less than demand, but since they didn't make very many of them. . .

Oh, and during the gas crunch I got an offer of 10,000 bucks on my HF, which in retrospect I probably should have taken them up on Anything with good efficiency was selling at inflated prices when gas was 4 bucks a gallon, not just the Insight.


No it doesn't. It has me sounding like a realist, and it has you sounding like some of the guys on the CRX forums. "Build the CRX again because I and 24 of my friends really want one!" Well, great, but to be a success you're gonna have to either sell it for about 200 grand a pop or find more people who want one. I'm not saying the Insight was a miserable car. I'm saying that the tradeoff of luxuries, power, and comfort is not worth the relatively minor fuel efficiency gains to most people. This new Insight is more like a car that they'd buy anyway, which means they might consider going the electro-hybrid route.

The original Insight was just like the S2000. They were never meant to sell in volume. They were meant to sell to enthusiasts (one to high MPG enthusiasts, the other to sports car enthusiasts), and to be a "hey dude look at what Honda can do!" lure to get people in the showrooms to look at Accords and Civics. Now they want to make one that appeals to the "masses," so to speak, and I think it's silly to decry that idea considering how much Toyota wiped the floor with them by making a Prius that felt more like a real car (even if it was ugly as hell).



In May of last year, right in the middle of the gas spike, the Civic sold over 53 thousand units. In one month. Think you can find even half that number of people /per month/ to buy the original Insight? I'll give you a hint. Honda's not stupid. If they were out there, Honda would have sold to them.

Because GM bought the patent to high-capacity LiIon batteries and sold it to Texaco. You're not gonna see those batteries powering cars in your lifetime unless someone changes patent law so that companies can't just sit on a patent to thwart progress at the expense of society - something I would wholly support, btw.


because they're expensive as hell and you'd have to replace them about every 4-5 years. No one's gonna go for that.

Agreed, but then they should have done that with the first Insight.


I bet they sell more of them than the old Insight. The trouble is societal, not Honda. Americans want big comfortable luxury cars. Hell we get mad if the electric windows don't have auto up. AND down. Look at a new Civic and compare it to one from the 70's. The Civic is bigger than the old Accord for god's sake. They could build us a 100mpg car tomorrow if we'd buy it, but we wouldn't because no one wants a 2 cylinder car with bicycle tires. There is a minimum standard of solidity and luxury that people are willing to accept, and the original insight does not meet that standard with enough people to be a commercially viable car.

You want progress? So do I. I wanted the original insight to do a hell of a lot better than 12mpg over the 1988 HF, but it didn't. I want to abandon hybrid technology altogether because it's stupid. If you have a gallon of milk, whether you drink 2 glasses a day or cut back to 1, you're still gonna run out. It's time to develop a car that runs on genuinely renewable energy rather than bullshit like ethanol, hydrogen, or "slightly less gas."