confirmed until closer to sale, but Kohei Hitomi admits it won’t
be cheap – reckon on little change from £35k. Clearly, as with
Range Rover and the Evoque, Honda’s betting on being able to
charge a premium for the car’s sheer desirability.
‘It’s a new dedicated EV platform, and we’ve tried to reduce
cost wherever possible,’ explains Hitomi. ‘But it’s important
not to degrade content because of cost. If you look at the Apple
iPhone and iPad, they are not cheap but still people want them.
Their high cost can be justified because they are practical and
perform well. It is the same for this car. We believe we can still
target a range of customers despite the quite high price.’
The interior is a real departure for Honda, with two giant
12.3-inch touchscreens sitting side by side on top of the flat,
spectacularly ’70s wood-effect dashboard. Its party piece is a
distraction-busting co-pilot mode, enabling the front passenger
to search for information (a map location, for example, or a
funny picture of a cat) and then swipe it across to the driver’s
screen. The screen interface is set to be rolled out to other
Honda production cars in the near future – hopefully it’ll be a
little more intuitive than the touchscreens in current Hondas.
As per the Audi e-Tron and McLaren Speedtail, door mirrorsSee it on a British city
street for the first
time and it won’t be
short of impactThe wood is
fake but the
touchscreens are
mighty real – both
measure 12.3-inch10 CARMAGAZINE.CO.UK | APRIL 2019