Tag Archives | Honda

New York 2011: Honda Shows Production Versions of 2012 Civic

By on April 21, 2011 in News

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.

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Not All New Cars are Better Than Their Old Models

By on March 16, 2011 in News

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.

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Japan’s Earthquake and Tsunami Halt Auto Production

By on March 14, 2011 in News

Information on what you can do to help can be found at the bottom of the article.

By Chris Haak

It goes without saying that in the devastating earthquake and follow-up tsunami that hit Japan last Friday, the largest cost will be a human one.  Thousands of people have been killed, and the death toll is going to continue to rise in the coming days and weeks as cleanup and recovery operations progress.

There’s also an economic cost to the disaster.  Early estimates are that reconstruction costs might exceed $35 billion USD, to say nothing of the diversion of resources away from attempting to grow Japan’s economy and overcome a 20-year period of stagnant economic growth and immense public debt.  The auto industry in Japan is not immune from these forces, and in fact has already been significantly impacted by the disaster, with more to come.

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What Car Did You Love?

By on February 14, 2011 in Features

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…

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Detroit 2011: 2012 Honda Civic Coupe and Sedan

By on January 11, 2011 in News

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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2010 US Auto Sales May Indicate Brighter 2011

By on January 5, 2011 in Editorials, News

By Chris Haak

The December 2010 US auto sales are in the books, and it was a pretty solid month overall, unless you work for Toyota.  Overall, industry light-vehicle sales were up 11.1 percent on the month, and coincidentally, 11.1 percent on the year.  Forget all of the talk over the past 12 months about SAAR (seasonally adjusted selling rate); with a full year now under our belts, we know exactly how many cars and trucks were sold.  The answer?  During 2010, dealers recorded 11,590,274 new-vehicle sales, compared to 10,431,510 new-vehicle sales during all of 2009.

As with any marathon like a year of car sales represents, there were some winners and losers, although there were certainly more winners in 2010 than there were in 2009.  Last year, you may recall, only Hyundai and Subaru posted year-over-year sales gains.  For 2010, the tables were turned, and all but Toyota and Suzuki lost share, although Suzuki’s loss was far more severe than Toyota’s was.  Toyota’s 2010 sales declined by 0.4 percent, and Suzuki’s slid by 38.0 percent.

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Industry Hit by Recall Epidemic

By on December 17, 2010 in News

By Charles Krome

When news broke recently that Toyota was already recalling its all-new 2011 Sienna after just a few months on sale, it seemed like a stale joke. The Toyota Recallathon had already sucked up millions of vehicles from around the world and caused significant damage to the company’s standing here in the U.S. I know there have been some bright spots, but after once appearing to be in line to become the country’s top-selling automaker, Toyota is now well off the pace set by both GM and Ford. Worse, the company has seen sales decline in four of the past five months even as the industry itself has clearly begun rebounding. So, as I mentioned, the fact that some 94,000 Swagger Wagons are having brake-light issues was no shocker.

But when you cut through all the noise, it’s still an open question as to whether Toyota’s quality is any different than that of any other car company. Consider this week’s roll call of recalls:

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The New Chevy Aveo Sonic, Take 2

By on December 13, 2010 in Editorials

By Charles Krome

Our head savant did a nice job detailing the General’s name game with the Chevrolet Aveo, but I wanted to get my pair of pennies in, too. (Also, I had already written this over the weekend, before I saw his article.)

My starting point is Chris’ comment about how the current Aveo is “not a horrible car”—because that certainly applies to where it sits in the sales standings.

Let’s do a bit of a blind test on some key players in the subcompact segment, shall we? First, here are the year-to-date numbers from three mainstream entries:

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Ford and Honda Tops In Customer Retention Study

By on December 9, 2010 in News

By Chris Haak

According to the annual customer retention study conducted by J.D. Power and Associates, the Ford and Honda brands each managed to retain 62 percent of their buyers during 2010, putting them in the top spots among brands sold in the US.  The former top brand in customer retention, Mercedes-Benz, saw its loyalty rate slip from 66 percent in 2009 to 59 percent in 2010.  Ford coincidentally showed an improvement similar to the size of Mercedes’ slippage.

On the bottom end of the scale, Saab showed a pathetic 4 percent retention rate, but for quite a while, there were nearly no new Saabs available to purchase while the small Swedish automaker actually began wind-down proceedings before Spyker swept in and rescued the company.  Jaguar, however, has no such excuse for its 16 percent retention rate.  Another interesting brand is Toyota, which – at 60 percent customer retention – is right on the heels of the leaders, despite what we might expect to see in the form of fallout from its recall crisis earlier this year.  Hyundai and Lexus share the 60 percent mark with Toyota, and Kia made a dramatic 21-point leap, from 37 percent to 58 percent, in just a single year.

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Is the Honda CR-Z already DOA?

By on December 8, 2010 in News

By Charles Krome

Although it must have seemed like a good idea at the time—to somebody—the Honda CR-Z is already shaping up to be the Pontiac Aztek of the hybrid world: Everything about the car seems to have been designed by committee to meet the needs of a different segment of the marketplace, with the result being that it’s making no one happy.

That includes the folks at Consumer Reports. They recently put the CR-Z into a mini comparo with three other newish/greenish vehicles, including the VW Jetta Sportwagen TDI, MAZDA2 and Ford Fiesta. And Rik Paul, automotive editor for CR, sang a familiar refrain: “The CR-Z tries to be the sporty hybrid and it’s not outstanding in either category. It’s not fun to drive and the fuel economy is not what you’d expect from a hybrid.”

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