When it rains, it pours. Although Honda has been largely quiet on the electric vehicle front, opting to initially do the steamed hams thing with GM tech in America, that’s about to change. An all-Honda dedicated electric vehicle platform is coming, and the automaker has released a flood of concepts highlighting its future plans. Honda is rolling out a ton of cool stuff at the Japan Mobility Show, kicking off Oct. 25, including a tiny electric scooter, a Changli competitor, and even an electric sports car concept. Let’s dig in, shall we?
Honda Sustaina-C Concept
Right off the bat, it’s the Sustaina-C, a cute car with a vitamin supplement-like name that I’m willing to overlook because the styling’s just so damn adorable. It’s like a Honda e but more utilitarian, with swathes of unpainted materials to shrug off parking knocks (Editor’s Note: It kinda reminds me of a modernized EV Ford Ka – JT) and a fetching three-door hatchback form. Hell yeah. This little concept is paneled in recycled acrylic resin, an unorthodox material for a car that should be very sustainable indeed. Oh, and it comes with a friend.
Honda Pocket Concept
If the Honda Motocompacto has one foot in the past, the Pocket concept has both feet firmly in the future. Paneled in the same recycled resin as the Sustaina-C concept, this little scooter looks like a wicked cool way of jetting around urban environments. From the giant chevron motif to the trapezoidal kickstands, it just oozes style from head to toe. Sure, it might be micromobility, but the statement it makes is massive.
The CI-MEV, For Which Mitsubishi Might Want A Word
Next up, it’s a little something called the CI-MEV. Honda’s not brilliant with names these days, is it? Read it really fast, and this thing sounds like an egg-shaped Mitsubishi. Awkward. Basically, what we have here is an autonomous golf cart, or perhaps a sensor-guided Changli. It’s easy to chuckle and wonder why Honda would bother in this segment, but the automaker has a rather clear answer:
“Honda is striving to augment the living radius for people, especially for those who are in situations that tend to limit mobility, such as when there is no public transportation or when people experience difficulty in walking a long distance. “
Whenever Honda wants to enter a segment or create its own, it usually kicks some serious ass, so there’s a chance the Japanese giant could dominate the enclosed mobility scooter segment if it wanted to.
Avatar Robot
ASIMO, is that you? Erm, not quite, for Honda’s Avatar Robot is actually you. Or at least a proxy of you. See, Honda describes this device as “Striving to realize which can perform tasks by adapting themselves to the environment where people live,” which doesn’t help in any way, shape, or form. Still, it seems that it may let you put mustard on a hotdog from across the room, which would be a big hell yeah. Hey, what’s innovation if not inventing ever more expensive ways to be lazy? In all seriousness, this proxy stuff could be incredibly useful in, say, bomb defusal or space.
Honda Specialty Sports Concept
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: Honda has confirmed that an electric sports car concept is on the docket for the Japan Mobility Show. It’s no secret that the automaker wants to build sports cars as bridges into the electric era, and this should be our first taste. Usually, when Honda rolls out a concept car, it’s actually a thinly-veiled production model, so there’s a chance whatever drops at the Japan Mobility Show could end up on showroom floors. I guess we’ll just have to wait a month to find out.
(Photo credits: Honda)
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Honda also has a new EV brand in China, Lingxi.
Sustaina-C and Pocket are 100% futuristic Honda City and Motocompo
The robot? Well, look at you, young person, still taking good health, mobility and dexterity for granted.
If they didn’t give us the e, Honda is probably not going to give us the C either. 🙁
I vacationed in Europe last week and I’m still pining for all of their tiny lil hatchbacks. Honda e, Toyota Aygo X and Auris, Kia S Tonic (stonic?), VW Polo, Hyundai i10. Why not, America? WHY NOT?
This is nice to see, as I feel like for a company that used to be cutting edge, there’s just not a lot to get excited about over at Honda. They don’t have a dedicated sports car (S2000) or a niche vehicle (Element) and they don’t appear to be interested in breaking into segments they haven’t historically competed in (off-road, full-size trucks, etc). They have a perfectly decent lineup of regular-ass cars, and that’s it.
I get that they make money this way, but I don’t see a future where many people pine over Hondas, if this is the way that they’re going to do things from now on.
The only question worth asking about androids and AI:
When can it do my dishes?
Is it just me or does that scooter look as if it is designed to be ridden with a sort of squarish yellow helmet? So you can be a Lego person for a bit?.
I, for one, welcome our CI-MEV future. Gimme that city car wedge life
“In all seriousness, this proxy stuff could be incredibly useful in, say, bomb defusal or space.”
Or surgery. There are already surgical robots, now its just a matter of having that cheap surgeon successfully operate on some cheap bastard in BFE Arizona from Bangalore.
A lot of medicine is being done remotely now, so I wouldn’t rule it out. However, given the lag and glitchiness inherent in the intertubes currently, I think it’ll be a while before surgery is one of those things.
Hard to say. Most of my Zoom calls are so good the caller might as well be in the same room as thousands of miles away. Neither of us are on anything fancy either.
I’d imagine a much more robust internet connection between medical centers would be good and reliable enough for at least the bread and butter surgeries.
The institution doing remote medicine will not be on the public internet, they’ll either have their own private high bandwidth pipe or use one temporarily. A private pipe gives security and speed so the lag is minimized to the point it’s not an issue. Of course the signal still has to travel long distances, but despite the multiple repeating amps over that distance, it will be closer to the speed of light than anything else.
Or, relating to the implied disabled/elderly target market for that CI-MEV, people with mobility challenges could perhaps use the robot to do things they are no longer physically capable of doing, without asking someone else to do it. You know, if they have the money for an advanced robot assistant.
Which kind of makes me wonder about the possibility of human guided drone taxis.
Would use the same tech the military uses to blow people up a world away but here being used benignly to move disabled/elderly folks around without all that pesky AI.
Would it be 100% safe? Probably not but I think it would be preferable to those elderly having to driving themselves and cheaper than paying Americans to drive those folks around.
Remember the NSX concept that was shown off in 2012? It was 3 years later that the production model was shown, after already having commercials for it since 2012. Hopefully they don’t repeat this mistake.
Just bring the Honda E over here! I would love one of those cheerful little things! It’s like the Mini Cooper EV, but without the “premium” pricetag
2023 Mini Cooper SE pricing: £32,550 UK, €38,690 Netherlands, €35,700 Germany.
2021-2022 Honda e pricing: £34,365 UK, €36,160 Netherlands, €33,850 Germany.
I dunno about lacking the Mini’s premium pricetag, those pricetags are awfully close.
Haha fair enough. Clearly I hadn’t bothered to look it up. In the Honda’s defense, at least it gets 140 miles vs the 110?
222 vs 203 km WLTP, so the Honda e probably got 120 mi EPA. Still, it was pretty cute and Honda did good with the interior, so you’re not alone in wishing it came stateside.
Fair enough, they’re close enough in just about everything to not matter. I still want one haha.
If the Sustaina-C is the future of cheerful shitboxes, I’m all for it. Obviously only a concept, but, with the lack of cheap choices, if it can come to market with a happy face and be acceptable transport, they’ll sell like crazy.
Of course, I have no idea what the price will be. It just looks cheerfully cheap to me—and I think that’s a good thing.
And it has black plastic cladding and wheels that are enormous in proportion, which means it might be SUV-like enough to justify selling it in the US, except for the door count
It doesn’t look like aero drag reduction was a major focus, so its efficiency won’t be all that great even if it is light. Even if they by some miracle got the weight down to 2,000 lbs, this is probably a 250+ Wh/mile car. Which will make cost per mile of range go up due to requiring more battery. I suspect the significantly heavier Mercedes CLA will prove more efficient, should both these cars see production.
That Honda Pocket looks fun