May 19, 2009
Honda's new Insight: Dreadful
Jeremy Clarkson, the enfant terrible of automobile reviews in the U.K., has taken a look at the Honda Insight hybrid, designed to steal the smug crown from Toyota's Pious Prius.
He is, to put it mildly, less than impressed. To be blunt, he hates it.
It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.
[...]
The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.
So you’re sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you’re doing only 23mph because that’s about the top speed, and you’re thinking things can’t get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit.
Because the Honda has two motors, one that runs on petrol and one that runs on batteries, it is more expensive to make than a car that has one. But since the whole point of this car is that it could be sold for less than Toyota’s Smugmobile, the engineers have plainly peeled the suspension components to the bone. The result is a ride that beggars belief.
"A dog sitting on a ham slicer"? Ouch.
Clarkson soon heads off in another direction, his bilious gaze fixed on the questionable eco-weenie bona fides of the very hybrid genre itself, as he asks an uncomfortable question:
[W]hat about the eco-cost of building the car in the first place?
The nickel for the battery has to come from somewhere. Canada, usually. It has to be shipped to Japan, not on a sailing boat, I presume. And then it must be converted, not in a tree house, into a battery, and then that battery must be transported, not on an ox cart, to the Insight production plant in Suzuka. And then the finished car has to be shipped, not by Thor Heyerdahl, to Britain, where it can be transported, not by wind, to the home of a man with a beard who thinks he’s doing the world a favour.
Why doesn’t he just buy a Range Rover, which is made from local components, just down the road? No, really — weird-beards buy locally produced meat and vegetables for eco-reasons. So why not apply the same logic to cars?
At this point you will probably dismiss what I’m saying as the rantings of a petrolhead, and think that I have my head in the sand.
That’s not true. While I have yet to be convinced that man’s 3% contribution to the planet’s greenhouse gases affects the climate, I do recognise that oil is a finite resource and that as it becomes more scarce, the political ramifications could well be dire. I therefore absolutely accept the urgent need for alternative fuels.
But let me be clear that hybrid cars are designed solely to milk the guilt genes of the smug and the foolish. And that pure electric cars, such as the G-Wiz and the Tesla, don’t work at all because they are just too inconvenient.
I've long thought that the costs associated with producing hybrids, especially the enormous battery packs, exact a much higher price on the environment than their moonbat fans can even begin to imagine. It seems I've got some company in my poison-quill-wielding friend.
The final insult is that the mileage achieved in these hybrids is not much different than that attainable in the latest generation of clean-running diesels, providing much sportier rides and more luxurious accommodations than the Prius or the Insight.
But you don't feel nearly as superior behind the wheel of a diesel; the hybrids are much more attitude inducing.
Posted by Mike Lief at May 19, 2009 10:31 PM
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Comments
So why isn't there a diesel Escalade?
Posted by: The Little Coach at May 26, 2009 03:45 PM