Quote:
Originally Posted by bish79
The sales in the first full month after the new Prius was released are not a real indication of anything except the fact that a lot of gen 2 Prius owners are jumping to the new gen 3 Prius.
Wait at least two more years, after gas prices go back up and more ordinary people start looking at hybrids and see what happens.
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I doubt it will take even that long. And I'm a case in point for maybe lots of new hybrid buyers in that I wanted a hybrid but wasn't enamoured with the look of the Prius (or its price). I and my wife both think the I2 is way cooler looking than the Prius and I'd been waiting for Honda to come up with something like this for a couple of years as the HCH was no good (the rear seats don't fold down so you can't transport anything long - e.g. from furniture shops or garden / home improvement shops). The I2 with the current government discount for scrapping my "old guzzler" came just at the right time for me.
But I think Honda will have to up their game some more in the next couple of years as there soon will be a plethora of cheaper hybrids from the other makers that inhabit the super-mini class (e.g. Hyundai and Kia that make sub-£6k cars). Honda and Toyota are in a privileged position of being in a market of two at the moment in that sector (I deliberately exclude the likes of the Lexus hybrid SUV which although a hybrid isn't competing in the high volume market of small family cars).
Already some of the "eco" super-minis are eroding the I2 argument as they can make 60-80MPG without any hybrid tech (at least on the extra urban and combined cycles - they usually don't fare so well on the urban cycle because they don't have auto-stop engines). The I2 only scores because even though it's a bigger class of car, it's urban figures are still better than the super-minis and you have to remember that the super-minis only have 1.0-1.2 petrol engines or 1.2-1.4 turbo diesels. But is that advantage in size and urban MPGs really worth the extra £10k price differential?
Honda need to "step on the gas" so to speak and get their rumoured Jazz / Fit hybrid out and at a price that doesn't look too out of kilter with the rest of the super-mini segment where competition is fierce.
A couple of years down the road I think the Insight may even be dropped as a model as the mainstream Civic (not the special saloon variant we have now) will probably sprout a IMA variant and then why would you have two small family class cars in your line-up? Perhaps the Insight will always be retained as a "true hypermiler's car" (because that's it's DNA) while the Civic will be more performance oriented - maybe a hybrid Civic Type-R??? Replace the current 2.0 Type-R engine with a blueprinted 1.8 and a 20kW IMA...
One thing is for sure... Being world #1 in internal combustion engine makers won't mean a thing in 5 years when everyone is going electric. Every bit of sales blurb I've had from Honda in the run-up to buying the I2 has mentioned the FCX. It's a wonderful dream and I'd like to live it (the FCX is a pretty cool looking car regardless of what powers it, BTW) but Honda need to still be in the game by the time the hydrogen infrastructure is in place to make the FCX more than just a dream. It's trying with the introduction of the companion product, the Home CHP (combined heat & power hydrogen maker) and that solves the problem of having
no public hydrogen infrastructure, but it doesn't do anything to solve the problem of owning one car that I can fill up at home for the drive for work but also need to drive for 1000's of miles across Europe on holiday.
It may even be one of the EV start-ups that become the "Honda" of the next 50 years as they are starting from a position of focusing only on the new technology without the "baggage" of the past 50+ years of being an ICE manufacturer to slow them down. Fuel prices will be the meteor that hits the Earth and the dinosaur car makers have got to evolve fast or...
June sales
) its just not worth it. And many people who have a junker truck like that have it because they can't afford anything newer, so they're out too. 
