The Honda Insight is a car that you could never recommend anyone buy. At nearly AUD$50,000 it's about AUD$30,000 too expensive. It has a poor ride - in fact, its suspension needs quite a deal of sorting - and an amazing lack of interior room. The equipment level is bare bones for this much money, and its acceleration bottom of the class. And yet the Insight is one of the most impressive cars that I have ever driven. It's a technological tour de force of almost breathtaking proportions, a car which shows the collective engineering genius of the Honda company in a way never before achieved by any of their other products. The Honda NSX? It didn't do much - if anything - that hadn't been done before. The S2000? Yes, lots of power from a small engine but beyond that, so what? But the Insight is without question the best car in the whole world in at least two aspects. Firstly - and by far the more important - it is the most fuel-efficient car ever produced. And secondly, it has the lowest aerodynamic drag of any production car. The Insight is a car which must have cost a staggering amount to develop. (We'd guess that even at AUD$48,900, Honda isn't making a profit on any it sells.) From its all-aluminium body to its unique 1-litre low friction engine, from its nickel metal hydride battery pack to its combined electric motor/generator/starter, the technology has been developed uniquely for this car. The result is a package that is intriguingly capable in so many areas - and so bad in some others. We drove the Insight well over 4000 kilometres in the fortnight that we had the car - and 3500 of those were done in just four days. Over that distance we came to recognise the inadequacy of the thinly-padded seats, the noticeable lack of features now taken for granted in new cars (there's no seat height adjustment, no lumbar adjust, no steering wheel adjust, no B-pillar seatbelt adjust, no second vanity mirror, no side airbags - the omissions list goes on and on), and the fact that almost certainly Honda's worldwide testing program for the prototypes was quite limited. Otherwise, how would a car be released that has such incredibly bad tyre noise on coarse surfaces, and rear dampers that can be made to fade away on bumpy secondary roads driven at 110 km/h? But we also came to love the brilliance of the aerodynamics (the way that the car would just roll on and on when placed in neutral at 100 km/h), and the sheer intelligent design that has gone into the driveline. Ahh, that driveline. The starting point is a 1-litre, SOHC, 3-cylinder engine. It's a VTEC design (note that the modern incarnation doesn't have a power step in the full-throttle rev range) that has been optimised for this application. In fact, that's a bit misleading: it has been specifically designed and built for a hybrid car. Peak torque of the driveline is at an incredibly low 1500 rpm, while the max power of 56kW is at 5700 rpm. In between there's a delightfully flat torque curve. But - talking about torque - there's also a 10kW electric motor sandwiched between the engine and gearbox. And not just an electric motor, either. It also doubles as a high-speed starter motor and a generator. Put your foot down - especially at low revs - and the torque output of the combination is massively increased by the electric kick. When you thought you had only 70 or so Newton Metres at 1200 rpm (which is still very good for a 1-litre car!), along comes nearly another 70Nm! Fed in as progressively as you choose to move your right foot, the bottom-end torque makes the Insight surprisingly swift in the cut and thrust of city traffic. On the open road there's still electric assistance, but it's more like a gentle turbo boost. Depending on the level of juice in the battery and how many occupants are in the car, the Insight gets to 100 km/h in about 12 seconds, but because of its torque delivery it usually feels a little faster than this. But how is the battery charged? The 144-volt battery bank gets filled up by the electric motor, working in reverse. Whenever you abruptly lift the throttle the dashboard instruments show electric charge flowing back into the battery; this helps slow you down. And since the Insight tends to keep on rolling and rolling and rolling without this so-called regenerative braking at work, the Insight actually feels very normal when you lift off. Place your foot gently on the brake pedal and the electric braking force increases, while press harder again and the normal friction brakes come into effect. Little discs on the front (they were terribly warped in the press car) and drums at the back. Yes, drums.... In addition to its low drag and light weight (did we say that the Insight weighs only 827kg?) and hybrid petrol/electric driveline, the Insight has another trick in its book. Come to a halt at a set of traffic lights (or anywhere for that matter), select neutral and pull the clutch out and the engine turns off. But there's no need to panic because as soon as you select a gear, back it springs into life. The high-speed motor/generator/starter can start the car in just 0.15 seconds - and even if it's a bit slower than that, the battery assist will still get you away as the engine is coming alive. So what does all this techno-trickery achieve? In short, unbelievable fuel economy. In the 3500-kilometre trip, running two-up with some luggage, always staying at or above the speed limit and passing other traffic at speeds of up to 140 km/h, the Insight turned in a whole-trip average of 3.6 litres/100 km. In the real world, that's so far ahead of anything else (including the hybrid Toyota Prius) that it's not even funny. That's motorbike economy in a car with a CD-tuner, two seats, air-conditioning, twin airbags...suddenly the equipment list doesn't look so skimpy! In normal urban driving, expect similar fuel economy - the long drive included a helluva lot of hills, headwinds, urban traffic in the cities - it was no economy run, that's for sure. But in a road test of a new car the asking price is always the most important criterion. And with fuel so cheap, it's simply impossible to justify the price of the Insight. Honda's other small car - the Jazz - has a vastly lower price, better performance, more room, excellent ride and handling... and costs well under half the Insight. However, not for one moment would we suggest that the Insight is a bad car. In fact many of the technologies seen for the first time integrated into one package will be found piecemeal in cars released over the next decade. And we're sure that Honda will be at the forefront of that field, making use of the invaluable experience of having developed, built and marketed one of the most sophisticated and intriguing cars ever released.
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