It’s kind of funny reading the reviews of recent Honda models and the reactions of readers to them. The CRZ is a good example. This car is made for young Asians, period. It is a hybrid, which is cool and the kids who will be driving them (note I do not say “buying”) don’t give a rat’s-rump how many MPG it will get (because gas is still pretty cheap, not like these kids will be paying for it anyway), nor do they give a flyin’-you-know-what if the manual uses more gas, since 99.99999% percent of them will be automatics. In addition, the target market doesn’t even know what a CVT is, and could care less if said CVT doesn’t shift like a “conventional automatic.”
This is because the guys here, and elsewhere, panning this Honda are never going to buy one. Middle aged (mostly) white men, such as myself, are comparing this car to the CRX which was made before most of the people who will buy the CRZ were born. I deal with young Asians all the time in my business. For them, this is the coolest of the cool and a car they can easily get Ma-ma and Ba-ba to fork out for, because it is safe, not too fast and doesn’t cost an arm and a chicken foot. The kids who want these cars are into flashing lights, things that go bleep and sat-nav so they can find the Hello Kitty Store. They don’t care how “linear” the steering is; they want a car they and their friends will consider trendy and cool.
Do these kids want 200+ hp? Nope, Ba-ba would never allow it and here in Vancouver driving fast on a novice licence means a two year suspension in the blink of an eye. Hell, we have Ferraris all over the place here with N signs in the back window, streaking down Cambie Street at a blistering 50 km/h.
Honda has done some cool things. When the new Civic came out in 2006, fogies (my age) wailed about the design as being “too radical” and then Honda sold about a bazillion of the things. If you want staid and boring, your local Toyota store can serve this up in spades but for young people, Hondas are infinitely cooler than Toyotas. Honda is keeping the youth market happy and then they step up the ladder, because in Soviet Canuckistan anyway, Honda has 74% retention. That’s pretty smart, eh?
