Quote:
Originally Posted by Osnabrueck  I think Honda is missing a golden opportunity to add spice to their North America lineup with this hatchback.
I feel that Honda shot themselves in the foot by hastily coming to market with the Fit - a product that is already at its midlife and isn't a great ambassador of Honda brand values.
Sure, there was tremendous growth in the econohatch segment, with the Scions xA, xB as well as the Yaris and Versa, but the Civic Hatchback is a tremendously cool piece of J-Style engineering and is something that could really energize Honda's youth base, which they've been trying to reinvigorate with the new Civic Coupe and Sedan.
Oh well, at least we have the coupe, and it's pretty good lookin'. |
It would seem like they are missing an opportunity, but, unfortunately, hatchbacks don't generally do well in North America. For example, the Jetta (we still call it that, here) outsells the Golf (the Rabbit, now) by a large margin. Let's see what'll happen now that manufacturers are making smaller hatches (Fit, Yaris, Rondo, Rio, Accent, Versa, etc.), for now.
Like I said earlier, I'd love to have the hatch, here...my next car will be an Si, but I'd like this hatch, instead. The other problem, now that I think about it, is Honda would have to figure out where to build the hatch for NA. Currently, as far as I know, they don't have the capacity at any of their NA plants to pull it off & it was too expensive to keep shipping the last hatch over from England, as I recall.