Honda Motor Co. plans to launch a small car by 2009 that uses a new “affordable” gas-electric hybrid engine as well as diesel-powered versions of its larger vehicles as part of a strategy to improve fuel-efficiency of its U.S. models, a senior company executive said Thursday.
Tetsuo Iwamura, head of Honda’s U.S. sales and marketing unit, said the company could tweak its plans depending on what kind of alternative fuel technologies U.S. consumers embrace and what kind of new legal requirements on average corporate fuel economy the U.S. government puts in place.
“At this moment, we say hybrid for small cars and diesel for large cars… but we have several other alternatives we are looking into,” Mr. Iwamura said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
The executive of the Tokyo-based auto maker said his company would like to see more details of the new average corporate fuel economy legislation as quickly as possible, so that it could better prepare which of those alternative fuel technologies would be ideal for deployment in the U.S.
Among technologies Honda is considering in addition to hybrid and new clean diesel technologies, Mr. Iwamura said, are flex-fuel vehicles that could be powered by ethanol, as well as natural gas-fueled cars. He declined to elaborate.
But for now, Honda is moving ahead with the two-pronged approach in improving its fleet’s average fuel economy by coming up with more affordable small hybrid vehicles and betting on new clean diesel technology.
One of the first cars under that strategy is to hit the U.S. market is what Mr. Iwamura described as a highly affordable subcompact hybrid, slated for a launch in 2009. He said Honda is planning to sell 100,000 of the new small hybrid in North America and another 100,000 across the rest of the world.
Honda officials have said in the past that a hybrid version of the Civic, a compact car, costs about $4,000 more than a comparably equipped gasoline-engine Civic model. With the new subcompact hybrid, they said Honda is aiming to cut the hybrid premium to less than $2,000 — about what a consumer pays for a satellite-based navigation system as optional added equipment.
That is possible, Mr. Iwamura said Thursday, because of greater economies of scale Honda is expected to achieve thanks to the sheer number of the new hybrid it expects to sell in North America and around the world.
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