It’s True: Honda Has Prius Clone — Designers Lack Creativity
Last month I reported on some Car & Driver spy photos that indicated Honda would be building a hybrid-only car that looked almost exactly like the Prius. Today, Honda confirmed that those spy photos were genuine — and that their designers don’t have any creativity.
- » See also: Prius Sales Could Soon Outpace Camry, Says President of Toyota U.S.A.
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Honda will be debuting the rebranded Insight hybrid at the 2008 Paris International Auto Show on October 2nd. Although Honda has already begun the spin machine claiming that the Insight Hybrid looks more like the FCX Clarity than the Prius, that certainly seems like a stretch to me. With the exception of the grill and the headlights, the rest of the Insight looks damn near like an exact replica of the Prius.
The Insight will use Honda’s Integrated Motor Assist™ hybrid technology which, Honda claims, has allowed them to achieve significant cost reductions — base model starting at $18,500 — making the Insight the most affordable hybrid vehicle to date. Along with the Civic Hybrid, the new vehicle will be produced at an expanded hybrid vehicle production line at the Suzuka factory in Japan.
Posts Related to Hybrids and Honda:
- Honda Begins “Production” of Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle
- Report Claims Every New Car Will Be a Hybrid By 2020
- Late to the High Gas Price Party: Honda Building Prius Clone
- Toyota Prius to Get Solar Power
- Paul McCartney’s Lexus Hybrid Gets 4 MPG
Image Credits: Toyota and Honda
They don’t lack creativity. It’s just that since it looks so much like the Prius, people are more likely to assume it’s a hybrid and go for it. It’s a marketing stint, that really will work…
I’m sorry, they look absolutely nothing alike, aside from the overall shape of the windows.
I mean, come on:
http://image.automotive.com/f/miscellaneous/2007-toyota-prius-touring-edition/1000476+w700+cr1+re0+ar1/2007-toyota-prius-touring-edition-front-left.jpg
That’s where the similarities end.
All aerodynamic cars don’t have to look the same. The EV1 was more aerodynamic than either of these, and so was the Dymaxion car from 1933 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlLZE23EJKs
The next generation will be even more efficient like the Aptera http://www.aptera.com/
I suspect the Honda’s shape grew out of “lets make something that we already know will sell, but make it a little cheaper”.
[...] agree with Nick Chambers that the new Insight Concept resembles the Prius, but I also thought that the second generation Prius was similar to the first generation [...]
Dang Nick, you went and kicked over a nest of Honda lovers. How dare you speak ill of our Japanese overlords.
Nick,
Obviously you have no knowledge of Honda, other than what you read from other uninformed writers. Here’s an informed take on the copy-cat subject by Dan Edmunds, Director of Vehicle Testing at edmunds.com:
Let’s address the elephant in the room first, shall we? Many who have seen early photographs of the 2010 Honda Insight Hybrid have dismissed it as nothing more than a carbon copy of a Toyota Prius.
These people would be wrong.
What “these people” are forgetting is what was said about the current Toyota Prius when it first debuted in the fall of 2003. “It looks like a four-door Honda CRX,” they whined.
Honda Copied…Honda
Much of this finger-pointing stems from the nearly horizontal rear glass of the 2010 Honda Insight with its vertical, peekaboo rear window for enhanced rearward visibility.
The vertical glass panel allows the Insight to fully exploit the widely recognized aerodynamic principles of Wunibald Kamm, who discovered that if one abruptly chopped the tail end off a teardrop, the most streamlined of shapes, most of the low-drag goodness would remain. A Kamm back, they call it.
Yes, the Toyota Prius has this very arrangement. But so did the 2000-’06 Honda Insight and the 1988-’91 Honda CRX before it. That the 2010 Insight looks this way is no accident, because Yasunari Seki, chief engineer for the 2010 Honda Insight, made his name at Honda while working on the CRX HF.
And that’s just what the 2010 Honda Insight is, more or less: a hybrid version of the late Honda CRX HF, but with four doors, room for five passengers, up-to-date safety features and modern conveniences.
With respect to the 2010 Honda Insight, Honda is guilty of copying no one but itself.
Pat,
You obviously have no knowledge of how to be a decent human being, aside from what you’ve learned from other jerks.
To fully understand what I know, you can peruse the rest of my writings here on gas 2.0, read what I’ve written for the New York Times, and read this particular article for more info on the aerodynamics question:
http://gas2.org/2008/09/15/do-cars-really-need-to-look-like-ufos-to-save-gas/
Toyota owners just want to think that the Prius was an original design. Far from it. Honda wasn’t either, but the original Insight IS the first US/Japanese Market mass production vehicle to use the design. It is based on a little known (well known to people who really know the history of cars, little known to some car-bloggers and so-called editors at edmunds.com, motortrend etc) as the Kamm/Koenig-Fachsenfeld Design.
The design molds two different aspects of aerodynamic design, one of which, the Kamm-back, describes a flat cutoff end which retains as much of the cross-sectional area of the car, reducing overall drag. The second aspect is that the tear-drop shape has the least surface resistance. The two-combined is what yielded the original Insight design, that which the Prius took and added another set of doors.
In this day and age of editorials and blogs, it is sad that so many people are misinformed/misled by false information.