Honestly insight is better than Prius C (Consumer Reports reviews)

Yet the market numbers, Prius c vs Insight, confirms CR has lost it.

Bob Wilson

 

Uhhhhh clown!

 

The Insight feels nothing like the Prius. When I test drove one, it was awful. We have both a Gen II and a new Prius C and both are great cars. Honda has lost their direction, hopefully they will find it and become competitive again in the next few years.

 

It looks like you get very different trim in America. That radio does look nasty, as does the whole dashboard. From the Prius Cs I've looked at here, they have a much better-quality dash and a radio that was made some time after 1989.

They've discontinued the Insight here because it was selling so badly. It's a much bigger car than the Prius C, and it was a similar price. But I always thought it looked kind of clumsy.

 

Just one comparitive look at the fuelly numbers is all you need to tell you which car is better at what it is designed to do.

DROID X2 ? 2

 

You don't even have to look at Fuelly.

The Insight is going alt+F4 after 2014.

I like the Insight.
It looks like somebody tried to make it look halfway decent, and the (some say"only")one advantage of the IMA system is that the whole car doesn't go TANGO-UNIFORM if the battery dies.
(or so I'm told.)

Unfortunately......
It actually makes a Prius seem almost sporty.
It turns like a pig on a skateboard, it's even slower wheezing up to highway speed than a Prius, the viability is almost as bad, it has the same bifurcated rear view with the same useless wiper, and it's just about as noisy as a Prius---but not nearly as big inside.

I personally think that it's a good car for 18K, but the market decided otherwise.

RIP, Insight.
We barely knew you.

 

The first quoted paragraph lists attributes that people consider when buying any car, not just a hybrid. I tend to think that those who choose a hybrid absolutely place a higher value on efficiency and mpg than they do on geegaws like holographic speedos and whiz-bang looks in their equally functional radios.

Your second paragraph is completely subjective. It's blond vs brunette, chocolate vs vanilla, coke vs pepsi, or Eminem vs the Eagles. It's nice that the Insight offers a complete package that floats your boat. Everything about the C works for me.

Not least is the observed fact that I and many reviewers consistently achieve mpg numbers better than rated. I dont think the same can be said for the insight.

 

... in the North American market. In certain markets, the model year refers to the calendar year in which it was built or registered, not the U.S.-style Model Year.

Take a closer look at those 2009 Insights registered on Fuelly. Neither is in the U.S. market. One is in the UK, and several PC members from the UK can confirm their differing model year system. The other is in France.

Pot, meet kettle.

 

The website operators, and its members, are human beings too.

 

The two pictures you show above for the radio is silly. They are both the same. The Honda's is actually CHEAPER looking to anyone that knows about cars. The two single DIN slots are clearly demarcated. Looks horrible.

And our C looks nothing like that:

 

<irrelevant stream of consciousness>

Oh! I love Gavin DeGraw, and I like that song. How is it I did not have it already? Downloading it now. Thanks for the visual prompt!

</irrelevant stream of consciousness>

 

It's okay troy, even if your opinions are totally wrong (except maybe for the interior room fact), just take that great car of yours of a insight.

I don't get it, looking at the insight history on fuelly...why and how did honda go from a 55+ mpg car to a 40mpg car??? lol...I guess that's why the insight and cr-z are discontinued and history

 

Weight and drag. The original, or as I think of it, real Insight was a two seater with a slippery full aluminum body. That was expensive. So Honda abandoned the full aluminum with the Insight2, and further increased weight by putting in a rear seat. Then they cut corners on aerodynamics. Despite looking sleeker in profile, I think the Insight2 has a higher cd than the Prius C.

In addition to those corners, there were others cut in order to meet Honda's price point. The ICE didn't receive all the latest goodies that were going into the Civic hybrid. So it had lower efficiency and power. The power might not seem important, but it meant shorter gear ratios to get acceptable acceleration. Which means more gas burned.

The real Insight had a cult following. With the Insight2, Honda was trying to cash in on this. It could have worked, but the car was overpriced. Hype expected it to be a couple thousand less than it was. Even a thousand lower would had widen the price gap with the Prius. If the base Prius was $3k more instead of $2k, then more may have opted for the Insight2, depending on the Honda dealers. As it was, Honda would have been better just giving us the Fit hybrid, which the Insight2 was based off of. The non-hybrid still does well considering this generation's age, and the asking price for the hybrid would appear fair in comparison.

The CR-Z was too unfocused, and didn't do any one thing well. It was trying to do all the things the CR-X did over multiple trims. The Insight was seen as the replacement for the CR-X HF. A late 1980s fuel economy monster. If the Insight2 had embraced that and remained a two seater, it could of gotten high mpg numbers while being affordable. Then the CR-Z could have focused on being the spiritual replacement of the CR-X Si. Two seaters have a more limited market, but they probably would have generated more interest than what Honda put out.

PS: The big mpg numbers of the real Insight were done on the ones with a manual transmission.