Honda Hybrid In Sight?  Not any more (but then again.)
  Say a fond goodbye to the so-called "ill mannered child" which may also be known as Honda’s first hybrid, aka the Insight.  While we applaud any company willing to risk resources and reputation in the name of a greener earth we still can’t call their failures successes out of appreciation alone.  So let’s face it, the Honda Insight was no Toyota Prius.  In recognition of this fact, Honda has apparently pulled the Insight from its 2003 line-up.

 

Still, all was not a complete disaster:  Honda’s Insight routinely beat Toyota’s Prius in the all-critical mileage category, leading to bragging rights for its most skillful of drivers, way up in the 100+ MPG range (if we can believe the internet, and who would doubt it!)

  The Toyota Prius came in a distant second in mileage but first in sales primarily because its approach to "hybridizing" was so, well, conventional.  Most simply put, Toyota essentially inserted an electric motor/generator combo somewhere along the drive train between a conventional gas engine and differential, then added regenerative braking. 
  The nice thing about this approach, lower research and development costs aside, was the minimal impact it had on "look and feel" to the ever change-resistant consumer.  More fanciful, the potential existed with Toyota’s approach to someday remove the gas engine and replace it with a fuel cell, thereby making the car emissions-free for very little yen. On the other hand, with its Insight, Honda went whole-hog when it created its first hybrid vehicle. 
  Gone was a conventional gas engine in favor of a single gas/electric power unit that could, in and of itself, be rightfully considered a hybrid.  With this radically new engine/motor/generator (enmogen?) power unit in place, the rest of the drive train was fairly conventional.  Further, the location of the motor/generator being directly adjacent to the gas-powered portion allowed for an eerily quiet, fuel-saving oddity:  the gas portion of the Insight’s power unit could be restarted both easily and repeatedly.  This feature allowed the gas-powered portion to be shut down completely as the vehicle came to a stop.
  Honda’s engineers since learned another trick for their "enmogen" hybrid power unit as well.  Why allow the compression (inherent in the gas-powered portion of the unit) to slow down the vehicle when all that energy could, instead, go into recharging the car’s batteries?  Finding no good answer, Honda figured out a way (using the gas engine’s valves) to relieve the backpressure. 
  Now, when this hybrid power unit is called on to help slow down the vehicle, most all of the energy bypasses the gas portion and flows into the generator where it is converted to electricity and sent to the batteries for storage.  Having thus created an extremely efficient engine, which can be retrofitted into an essentially otherwise conventional automobile, Honda no longer felt the need to use its hybrid power unit simply to push (pull?) around the essentially experimental Insight.  Instead, Honda shoehorned its advanced power unit into its ever-popular Honda Civic, releasing it as the (drum roll please) 2003 Civic Hybrid!
  Talk about your hybrid car that is totally transparent to the consumer!  Were it not for the badges on the back, even a cursory examination of the engine compartment may not reveal its true nature.  If we could pick products instead of stocks, we would bet our 401K on this model.  The new Civic Hybrid makes it hard to see why anyone would buy anything else unless, like some of us, we are with a 182cm+ man who simply can’t fit inside!  Sure, maybe the Toyota system remains the easier of the two to convert to fuel cells, perhaps, but then again the Civic Hybrid is here, now, at your showroom while fuel cell are yet distant dreams. We say don’t wait!

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