Solar City and Honda Team Up
A friend sent me this piece on Solar City and Honda, asking if I’d seen it.
Yes, I did. But “why Honda?” is a good question, I would think. They DO have a battery EV – “The Fit EV,” but they were ridiculously slow in making this happen, and they’re way behind the curve.
I just called a local Honda dealership, and they’re obviously not trying too hard to sell the car. The first salesperson misquoted the MSRP as $17K when it’s actually $36K; she didn’t know the FIT came in an EV version. When I asked for the most senior EV salesperson, I got a kid who didn’t know the difference between range and the MPG equivalent. When I asked about a tax credit that could offset the purchase price, he paused and said, “Yeah, I think there’s one. I’m not sure.”
Doh!
That’s not really a fair piece. You took a momentary snapshot of the current situation without considering the history. The first Hybrid Honda Accord came out about the same time the first Toyota Prius did. Several consumer magazines rated them and said they actually handled BETTER than both the Prius and the gas version of the same car. Toyota had better marketing and Honda gave up on it because they weren’t really big enough to support a niche product. Then gas prices blipped down a few cents and Americans all wanted bigger engines because gas was cheap(?) again. So Honda likely put their efforts into what the average consumer wanted and left hybrid plans on hold while Toyota’s electric car division had enough of a following to keep making their current car, if in smaller numbers.
Give them a bit of time and we’ll see how it goes.
The way I saw it, up until recently, Honda had all its EV eggs in the fuel-cell basket. It was less than two years ago that the company’s CEO announced its current plans for a battery EV.