It took me a week of banging my head on the steering wheel, but I think I finally figured out how to express my feelings about a modern Honda. Hondas are like BlackBerry smartphones. They are reliable, sturdy, and feel a bit stuck in the past. If you really need to get your e-mail and you need the highest grade of security pick the Honda. If you’re interested in embracing the future? Lets hope that Honda has some rapid innovation up their sleeves. The 2012 Honda Fit Sport does everything a car needs to do. It does these essential car activities very well and I am convinced that it will keep doing them for years to come. My concern is that in the market today it seems like the competition is innovating faster and bringing more exciting products to market. Continue Reading →
Honda Civic Hybrid Plaintiffs SHOULD Win
By Chris Haak
By now you’ve surely heard the story of Heather Peters, a disappointed Honda Civic Hybrid owner who took Honda to small-claims court in California and won a $9,800 judgment against the company. In California’s small-claims court, neither side may use a lawyer. Ms. Peters sued Honda because her Civic Hybrid didn’t get anywhere near the numbers posted on her car’s window label (which, for pre-2008 Civic Hybrids, was a whopping 49 MPG city/51 MPG highway/50 MPG combined. She won her case, but Honda has vowed to appeal, if for no other reason than to stem a tide of copycats who also want a pound of flesh from Honda.
First Drive: 2012 Honda CR-V
By Charles Krome
It’s no doubt been an ugly year for Honda. The company has lost more than 200,000 units of production that would have otherwise ended up in U.S. dealerships, and it’s still waiting for some facilities to get back up to full speed. Sales are down more than 5 percent through October, at a time when the industry as a whole has grown by about 7.5 percent. Worse, the all-new 2012 Honda Civic has been affected by both those same production problems as well as surprisingly weak reviews, allowing rivals like the Chevy Cruze to gain a significant foothold in the highly competitive compact car segment. In other words, there’s an awful lot riding on the launch of the completely redesigned 2012 Honda CR-V—but after a recent media drive for the vehicle, I’m not expecting an awful lot of new customers to be riding in it.
Review: 2012 Honda Civic 4DR EX-L NAVI
By Brendan Moore
For those of you that have never heard of him, Dan Neil is a great auto journalist. He’s also, by all accounts, a pretty good guy, and I’ve had a couple of brief exchanges with him over the years, and he does seem like a pretty good guy. He also won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2004 (yeah, an automotive writer- cool, huh?), presented annually to a newspaper writer who has demonstrated “distinguished criticism”. The distinguished criticism the Pulitzer Committee had in mind when they handed him that award was his “Rumble Seat” column for The Los Angeles Times, his then-employer. He reviewed passenger vehicles in that column.
He now writes for The Wall Street Journal. In his review of the 2012 Honda Civic Si published in the Journal on October 22, the header on the review was, “Honda’s Sporty New Civic, Heavy on the ‘Ick’.”
I would have given him the Pulitzer just for that alone. That’s some good writing, there.
Review: 2011 Honda Odyssey Touring Elite
By Chris Haak
When my wife and I decided almost four years ago that we had outgrown our midsize SUV and needed to get a bigger family hauler, I didn’t really know where to start looking. At the time, I was somewhat against the image of a minivan; having borrowed older ones from time to time, it seemed that I’d never been cut off by other motorists as often as on those occasions behind the wheel of an old Town & Country. To solve the problem, I embarked on a series of “family hauler” reviews, published on Autosavant, where I laid out my thoughts on three of the four contenders.
New York 2011: Honda Shows Production Versions of 2012 Civic
By Chris Haak
Back in January, Honda used the Detroit Auto Show to debut lightly-disguised concept versions of its 2012 Civic coupe and sedan. We covered that here already back then, so there’s no need to rehash all of that. In a nutshell, the new Civic is safer, more comfortable, and more efficient than the car it replaces. It’s also slightly – and I mean slightly – better looking than the 2011 car, with a bit more character and visual interest, and more resolved C-pillar treatment, particularly for the sedan.
The car actually went on sale today, April 20, so it’s a good thing that Honda’s press conference wasn’t bumped to day two of the show. The biggest news that we got today on the Civic was pricing and fuel economy figures, neither of which had been confirmed until now.
Not All New Cars are Better Than Their Old Models
By Chris Haak
A typical pattern in the life cycle of products in a competitive market is that a new product will be introduced, and it will be incrementally better than the one it replaces. Many times, its manufacturer will also at least attempt to benchmark the category’s leaders, and then either meet or beat the best attributes of those. Then, after a period of time, a competitor will launch a new product, which may set a new benchmark.
Continuous improvement is known as kaizen in Japanese, and it’s the principle that helped Japan, Inc. take a significant share of US new-car market since the 1970s. It’s also perhaps the worst-kept secret in the auto business that consistently applying incremental improvements over an extended period of time results in outstanding products that your customers are eager to line up to buy the new version at some point.
What Car Did You Love?
By Chris Haak
Of course, Valentine’s Day is about showing the people you love how much you love them, not about cars or even websites about cars and the car business. But that won’t stop us from considering which vehicles we truly love. To keep the conversation on track, let’s focus only on vehicles that we’ve actually owned. Which cars did you love, and what did you love about them?
I’ve owned about a dozen cars during my 20 years with a driver’s license (not counting the cars that I had the use of growing up as the son of a car dealer, which meant changing the car that I was driving – but not owning – a number of times ). The car I loved the most was…
Detroit 2011: 2012 Honda Civic Coupe and Sedan
By Chris Haak
As Autoextremist Peter DeLorenzo is fond to point out, Honda’s famous focus on engineering excellence is part of the reason that the company is called, “Honda Motor Company,” and not something like “Honda Transportation Appliance Company.” He never seems to mention, however, that Ford, Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, and GM all have “Motor” or “Motors” in their corporate names.
Having accounted for a large percentage of Honda’s sales over the past 39 years, the Civic is as close to a genuine franchise as there is in this industry. Screw up the Civic, and fans may abandon the brand for some of the many predators waiting in the wings, including the Hyundai Elantra, Chevy Volt, Ford Focus. A ruined Civic redesign would be akin to BMW messing up the 3 Series. It was OK when BMW flame-surfaced the 7 Series, Z4, and 5 Series. But had Chris Bangle done something like that to the 3 Series, he would have been run out of town. Honda knows that it can’t afford to screw up the Civic, which sold 260,218 units during 2010, making it the company’s second-best selling vehicle behind the Accord (311,381) and ahead of the CR-V (203,714).
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