Is the G1 Insight chassis made of aluminum too?

[dirty hippie]

I can't seem to find info anywhere that says it is or isn't.

Also is it true the Insight was handmade? Exactly what percentage of it was handmade? Are we talking about handmadfe as in how they hand make the Rolls Royce?

I was told that Honda sold the Insight at a huge lost. True?

[red1dr]

Originally Posted by dirty hippie

I can't seem to find info anywhere that says it is or isn't.

Again, this is in the Encyclopedia:
InsightCentral.net - Encyclopedia - Honda Insight Specifications
"Type: Aluminum monocoque
Materials: All structural components and most body panels are extruded or die-cast aluminum
Front fenders & rear fender skirts are a recyclable ABS/nylon composite"
You should read the Encyclopedia, lots of good info there.

Originally Posted by dirty hippie

Also is it true the Insight was handmade? Exactly what percentage of it was handmade? Are we talking about handmadfe as in how they hand make the Rolls Royce?

Hard to know, but you can be sure they didn't beat out panels over wooden forms as they used to do for the Rolls. Parts were probably mostly machine-made, engine and gearbox assembly by hand, overall assembly probably by hand as most cars are. There's a good chance robots did welding up of chassis.

Originally Posted by dirty hippie

I was told that Honda sold the Insight at a huge lost. True?

I doubt if anyone, even Honda, really knows. It depends a lot on what is included as costs and what is counted as income. I gather a lot of the aluminum fabrication methods came from the NSX, which was made in the same factory, so how much of that technology should be charged against the Insight-I?? Insight-I and the HCH-I pioneered the IMA system, which has since been used in other vehicles, so how should one amortize the R&D costs and value the knowledge gained from the Insight-I?? How much was having the most fuel-efficient vehicle on the planet worth to Honda's reputation?? How much will it cost to stock Insight-I parts for the legally required 10 years after cessation of production? And for the various recalls??

[boogetyboogety]

Agree with everything above, with a couple or three comments:

Quote: Originally Posted by dirty hippie
I can't seem to find info anywhere that says it is or isn't.

Again, this is in the Encyclopedia:
InsightCentral.net - Encyclopedia - Honda Insight Specifications
"Type: Aluminum monocoque
Materials: All structural components and most body panels are extruded or die-cast aluminum
Front fenders & rear fender skirts are a recyclable ABS/nylon composite"
You should read the Encyclopedia, lots of good info there.

At the time, someone in the car business said (can't remember who) the only all-aluminum-alloy vehicles besides the Insight and the S2000 were an Audi (an A8?) and a Jaguar. Maybe someone else can confirm or deny...?

Quote: Originally Posted by dirty hippie
Also is it true the Insight was handmade? Exactly what percentage of it was handmade? Are we talking about handmadfe as in how they hand make the Rolls Royce?


Hard to know, but you can be sure they didn't beat out panels over wooden forms as they used to do for the Rolls. Parts were probably mostly machine-made, engine and gearbox assembly by hand, overall assembly probably by hand as most cars are. There's a good chance robots did welding up of chassis.

Agreed, agreed, and agreed. Although the Insight probably had a much greater rate of hand-assembly than, say, even an S2000.


Quote: Originally Posted by dirty hippie
I was told that Honda sold the Insight at a huge lost. True?


I doubt if anyone, even Honda, really knows. It depends a lot on what is included as costs and what is counted as income. I gather a lot of the aluminum fabrication methods came from the NSX, which was made in the same factory, so how much of that technology should be charged against the Insight-I?? Insight-I and the HCH-I pioneered the IMA system, which has since been used in other vehicles, so how should one amortize the R&D costs and value the knowledge gained from the Insight-I?? How much was having the most fuel-efficient vehicle on the planet worth to Honda's reputation?? How much will it cost to stock Insight-I parts for the legally required 10 years after cessation of production? And for the various recalls??

Again, agreed [mostly], although it wouldn't surprise me to learn the Insight was a ~$25,000 car being sold for ~$20,000 right from s/n 0001. Considering the low volume and battery replacements experienced here, they not only "lost" money on each one over the years, they lost "tons" of yen. But look at it this way: Let's just use round numbers, use that $5,000 loss on each, and use roughly 20,000 Insights, X $5,000 loss, = $100,000,000, divided by eleven years, ~$9,000,000 a year for "free" advertising since 1999 (so far) putting Honda at the forefront of engineering and economy, with one of the most recognizeble cars on the planet... $9 mil sounds like a cheap annual advertising budget for an auto giant to me...

[Highmileage Insighter]

I was told the Gen 1 Insights cost closer to $45-50K each to produce. Basically, it is a semi hand built car based on the Acura NSX light weight frame design.

[ghillie]

"At the time, someone in the car business said (can't remember who) the only all-aluminum-alloy vehicles besides the Insight and the S2000 were an Audi (an A8?) and a Jaguar. Maybe someone else can confirm or deny...?"

The s2000 is not aluminium - the NSX is.

[Aaron Cake]

Based upon my welding experience and observations on the great variation of weld appearance and quality on my own Insight, I'd say that most of the welding was done by hand. Almost all of it was MIG welded, with only a few spot welds here and there.

One minor nitpick: The Insight does not have a chassis, it has a unibody.

I can't speak to the loss Honda suffered, but I have heard numbers from between $50,000 - $75,000 for production costs. These come from people "in the know" I have ran into over the years at various auto shows.

[JimGnitecki]

Aluminum cannot be mIGw elded. It requires TIG welding.

TIG welding is MUCH more complex and costly than MIG welding. Both the equipment required and the operator required are far more costly.

We all got an incredible bargain on our Insights. The car was a Honda science experiment on wheels that Honda priced at the rdiculously low price of $20k probably because:

1. They needed real world experience on how some radical ideas would actually perform on an everyday basis on real roads, in real diverse climates, with real diverse drivers

2. They needed to ensure that the buyers were "ordinary" people, not wealthy people, since the technologies were intended for use in future MODERATELY priced cars, so the price had to eb affordable for ordinary people, so Insight could not be priced based on its real costs

3. They needed to ensure that enough units were sold to make the results statistically valid.

Jim G

p.s. I previously owned an S2000. The S2000 is FAR less sophisticated than the Insight, and Honda had to price the S2000 at high $30,000s to make money. Yeah, they lost a LOT of money per Insight sold.

[red1dr]

Originally Posted by JimGnitecki

Aluminum cannot be mIGw elded. It requires TIG welding.

To expand my minimal knowledge of welding, I looked up MIG welding on Wikipedia, and found (asterisks mark relevant sections because I couldn't figure out how to bold or underline them):

"Gas metal arc welding (GMAW), sometimes referred to by its subtypes metal inert gas (MIG) welding or metal active gas (MAG) welding, is a semi-automatic or automatic arc welding process in which a continuous and consumable wire electrode and a shielding gas are fed through a welding gun. A constant voltage, direct current power source is most commonly used with GMAW, but constant current systems, as well as alternating current, can be used. There are four primary methods of metal transfer in GMAW, called globular, short-circuiting, spray, and pulsed-spray, each of which has distinct properties and corresponding advantages and limitations.
*Originally developed for welding aluminum* and other non-ferrous materials in the 1940s, GMAW was soon applied to steels because it allowed for lower welding time compared to other welding processes. The cost of inert gas limited its use in steels until several years later, when the use of semi-inert gases such as carbon dioxide became common. Further developments during the 1950s and 1960s gave the process more versatility and as a result, it became a highly used industrial process. Today, GMAW is the most common industrial welding process, preferred for its versatility, speed and the relative ease of adapting the process to robotic automation. *The automobile industry in particular uses GMAW welding almost exclusively*."

????

Later edit: I looked at TIG welding as well and apparently it too can be used with aluminum.

[JimGnitecki]

Whoever wrote that Wikipedia article got his welding acronyms mixed up, and consequently is just plain wrong.

I looked very seriously at an aluminum fabrication project about a year ago, and the very first thing I discovered in reading THREE welding books was that MIG welding will not work with aluminum. You need TIG welding. That early revelation threw me right out of the running on the fabrication, as a TIG welder is very costly (starts around $3500 for a decent one) and requires a HIGHLY skilled operator.

TIG welding is also much more difficult but much more elegant than MIG welding, and so can be used for thin (i.e. lightweight) material welding because it allows sufficient control to handle even very disparate thicknesses of metals. The example commonly used to illustarte this is that you can literally TIG weld a razor blade to a boat anchor,without deforming the razor blade. ARTISTS use TIG welding for sculpture work.

So, despite its high cost, TIG is used even on aluminum HORSE trailers, simply because it allows far better control than MIG welding, and that is critical in trying to produce a LIGHTWEIGHT assembly (like the structure of the Honda NSX or Insight). Honda tried to at least minimize the number of welds needed by using extrusions for many of the joints, but still would have had to do a LOT of TIG welding.

Jim G

[Hybrid-Battery-Repair]

Here are some photos of the honeycomb aluminum frame rails.