What We Know About the 2010 Honda Insight

Exclusive Summary About Honda Insight by Chris Poole and Toby Russell

The 2010 Honda Insight is due to start production early in calendar 2009 and should reach U.S. dealers by spring with a hoped-for starting price of less than $20,000. The new Insight will be built alongside the Civic at Honda’s Suzuka plant in Japan, but on a specific (“dedicated”) platform shared with no other current Honda vehicle.

Company officials say the 2010 Honda Insight will be a 5-passenger 4-door hatchback looking somewhat like the wedge-shaped FCX Clarity, the hydrogen-fuel-cell midsize sedan that’s now being leased to a handful of select Southern California consumers. The front-wheel-drive Insight will be smaller than Clarity, likely falling in the compact-car class.

The 2010 Honda Insight will use a lighter, simpler new version of the Civic Hybrid’s basic Integrated Motor Assist (IMA) drive system. Company talk of “significant” weight and cost reductions suggests the Hybrid’s IMA will have either a 3-cylinder engine or a small 4-cylinder with displacement of 1.0-1.3 liters. Ditto the expected continuously variable automatic transmission (CVT).

The batteries, which reportedly tuck beneath the cargo floor, will be conventional nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH), not the more-advanced lithium-ion (LI) type. Honda believes LI batteries are not yet ready for mass-market cars because of their cost and concerns about overheating.

The 2010 Honda Insight will also feature a new driver-focused fuel economy enhancement system called the Ecological Drive Assist System, or Eco Assist.

Why Choose a Honda Hybrid?

There are several companies that produce hybrid cars--Ford, Toyota, and Honda, among others. In this article, we will go over Honda's hybrid cars. Obviously Honda is a highly respected, well known “big player” motor manufacturer however, they have only been producing hybrid cars since 1999 when they manufactured the first Honda Insight hybrid.

Over the past few years, Honda's share of the American market has greatly increased. Presently, it sits at 13.2% with some of this increase probably being partially attributed to Honda’s production of hybrids and also its reputation for producing quality cars across a broad spectrum of price ranges.