Honda's Prius-killer is looking a lot like road kill.
When it debuted in March, Honda Motor Corp.'s retooled Insight hybrid looked to be the first serious challenger to the Prius, Toyota Motor Corp.'s ecological wunder-car. Graced with a low price, 40-mpg-plus fuel economy and the Japanese automaker's reputation for quality, the Insight even looked like the Prius.
Instead, all the Insight has delivered is a flurry of bad reviews and four months of dismal sales capped by a thorough battering at the hands of the Prius, whose third generation was launched in the U.S. last month. Increasingly, the Insight is looking like the latest in a series of hybrid frustrations for Honda.
"We're all pretty disappointed. We thought we had the next hit on our hands," said Don Marino, general manager of Honda of Santa Monica.
Marino said he was selling five to 10 Insights a month, far less than the 30 or so he expected to move.
Throughout the country, Americans bought 2,079 Insights in June, bringing total sales of the streamlined hatchback since March to 7,524, according to Autodata Corp. At that rate, Honda will sell less than a third of its goal of 90,000 in the first 12 months.
By comparison, the higher-priced Prius was snapped up by 12,998 drivers last month. Since March, Toyota has sold 40,398 of the gas-sippers.
The poor sales figures are all the more humbling because Honda was the first automaker to bring hybrids to the U.S. a decade ago, with an earlier version of the Insight. Yet although Honda products almost always score well with consumers and car enthusiasts, it just can't seem to get green right.
Weak sales forced the Japanese automaker to abandon an earlier two-seat Insight. Its powerful six-cylinder Accord hybrid had unimpressive gas mileage and was killed after three years. Combined, the two vehicles mustered scarcely 45,000 deliveries worldwide.
Meanwhile, the hybrid version of its popular Civic sedan, which Honda says it originally introduced to battle the Prius, has logged just a fifth as many sales as its rival.
"Honda just hasn't had a cogent hybrid strategy at all," said Eric Noble, president of Car Lab, a product planning and research firm.
