Source;http://www.burlappcars.com/2010/03/acura-tsx-wagon.html
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Another 2011 Honda Odyssey video w/more info.
Honda Odyssey Concept Auto Show Video – KBB
Uploaded by kelleybluebook. - Watch auto videos
2010 Honda CR-V EX-L NAVI Review
The front grille stretches wide to form a complex structure that integrates a pair of tapered headlight clusters for a unique crowning effect.
How does the Honda CR-V continue to shine, then? Well, this popular Japanese SUV boasts a rather distinctive silhouette and, while extreme off-road trips are definitely not its game, it offers a smooth, uneventful ride along with a sensible, fuel-efficient operation.
Sensible — now that’s a word that perfectly defines all aspects of the 2010 Honda CR-V.
Singular styling
It’s obviously a difficult thing to let your imagination run wild and create a fancy design when you’re given a specific assignment: to develop an SUV-style product that will appeal to the masses.
Consequently, Honda designers didn’t break any mold with the CR-V’s raised tail, fairly upright hatch and anonymous body lines. They did, however, have fun with the slightly arching roofline in the back that somewhat improves aerodynamics (or at least the impression of). The shape of the rearmost side windows further enhances this feeling of motion.
Revised for 2010, the front grille stretches wide to form a complex structure that integrates a pair of tapered headlight clusters for a unique crowning effect. Here you have an unpretentious SUV that still manages to stand out at first glance. Nothing flashy; just smart stuff.
Inside, the CR-V is surprisingly well-equipped (granted, my tester was the top-of-the-line EX-L NAVI). Build quality and material selection also impressed me, especially given the price range. The cabin is fairly spacious, too. Even tall friends of mine who sat in the back never complained about a lack of room. Behind them was a convenient cargo area offering easy access and decent volume.
Up front, the dashboard sure looks nice and displays cool backlighting at night, but the gear selector once again finds itself in an unconventional spot, right in the middle of the center stack. Some say they appreciate such ergonomics; I, on the contrary, find manipulating the CR-V shifter quite unnatural and unpleasant.
Build quality and material selection impressed me, especially given the price range.
Newfound energy on the road
The biggest flaw of the Honda CR-V used to be its underpowered 4-cylinder engine that often voiced discontent whenever you would try to push it. Fortunately, engineers addressed the issue by increasing output (+14 horsepower) while making the engine less fuel-thirsty. Bravo!
The new mill could be described as lively and responsive, not to mention quiet and predictable, even when you ask for a little more performance than you probably should. On-the-fly accelerations aren’t breathtaking but still on par with buyer expectations for this type of vehicle. As a bonus, the five-speed automatic transmission with Grade Logic Control knows how to pick the right gear at the right time.
The suspension plays a key role in delivering car-like driving dynamics, while Honda’s part-time 4WD system proves opportunistic in the most civilized conditions.On the other hand, the steering doesn’t feel as sharp and high on feedback as one could hope for. It does a decent job most of the time but clearly remains the weakest link in an otherwise well-executed, fun-to-drive compact 'ute.
The suspension plays a key role in delivering car-like driving dynamics, while Honda’s part-time 4WD system (which acts like a FWD setup until the front wheels start to slip) proves opportunistic in the most civilized conditions. As mentioned earlier, the CR-V should never be mistaken for an extreme sports tool; drivers who dare will get stuck in a hurry.
Wrap-up
Like I said, the competition in the compact SUV segment is wide open and incredibly fierce. Admittedly, despite a few shortcomings, the 2010 Honda CR-V still comes from the dominant breed and attracts more than a fair share of consumers. Emotion has little to do here; CR-V success depends on a simple, sensible recipe.
Source;
Can Honda Bring Corporate-Style Jet Travel to the Masses?
Private jet travel is convenient, luxurious and, of course, very expensive. The HondaJet represents an effort at changing that, by using technology and design to bring costs down and allow private-jet travel at costs that approach commercial ticket prices
So my column for the magazine in a couple of months is on new approaches to air travel. In the course of writing it, I spent a day with the pilots, engineers and designers of an aircraft that's meant to bring about just that sort of new approach: the HondaJet, a fast, comparatively cheap five-passenger Very Light Jet that Honda hopes will not only appeal to the usual run of corporate-jet purchasers, but that will also promote an entirely new way of flying, one that's capable of bridging the gap between cheap-but-unreliable commercial jet travel and swanky-but-expensive corporate jet travel. What I saw makes me think that the Honda folks just may be onto something.The HondaJet is the brainchild of Honda Aircraft president and CEO Michimasa Fujino. Fujino told me that his first job in the United States was in Mississippi, back in the 1980s, and that he found that wherever he traveled by air—even elsewhere in Mississippi—he usually wound up having to change planes in Atlanta. This seemed wasteful of time and fuel, and made travel iffier, since it created the risk of a missed connection. To Fujino, the hub-and-spoke system makes sense for a country like Japan, where Tokyo is at the center of everything, but much less sense for a country as big as the United States, where important places are widely distributed. For this, point-to-point travel is much better.
This is no secret, of course, to the people who travel by private jet now. But private jet travel is very expensive, which is why it is the domain of CEOs, celebrities and the like. The HondaJet represents an effort at changing all of that, by using technology and design to bring costs down and allow private-jet travel at costs that approach commercial ticket prices. (Fully loaded, Fujino says, the cost per seat on the HondaJet should be roughly comparable to a first-class commercial ticket). To keep costs down, the Honda folks have put a lot of thought into ways to make the plane as small and inexpensive as possible, without sacrificing comfort or speed.
This approach shows up in a lot of different places. To save weight (and hence fuel) the HondaJet's fuselage is all-composite construction. (I held some of the components in my hand—they were very stiff, but felt almost weightless.) The plane's engines are mounted, unusually enough, above rather than below the wings. This location change accomplishes two things: It allows the wings to be lowered, opening up more cabin space, and it means that the engines are directly above the landing gear, reducing wing loading on touchdown. (The over-the-wing placement also means that the wings baffle sound in flight, making things quieter on the ground). The HF-120 engines themselves are a new, lightweight, fuel-efficient design being codeveloped with General Electric.
Honda is also saving development money by taking advantage of modern computer power. Fujino notes that it's possible to do serious design work on a laptop nowadays, where not long ago it took an expensive engineering workstation. And Honda is making heavy use of simulations, with a sophisticated whole-aircraft simulator that allows real parts to be swapped in and tested against virtual parts and vice versa, allowing many stages of refinement before parts ever reach the test-flight stage. (When I flew the simulator, I noticed an antenna hanging over the plane: Turns out it transmits simulated GPS data to a real GPS receiver on the simulator, furthering Honda's goal of keeping things within the simulation as real as possible.)
The interior is also carefully contrived to provide space and comfort in as little room as possible. What Fujino says is that perceptions of luxury vary with time—the longer you're in a plane, the more uncomfortable a given set of accommodations will seem. (Even Air Force One, I've heard, feels cramped after a while). The HondaJet's relatively high speed (420 knots/485 mph) means that trips will tend to be short, so the cabin was optimized for comfort over a 2- to 3-hour period. I think it works. I'm a big guy—6 feet 3 inches and over 200 pounds—but I was comfortable in the cabin and seats. The built-in lavatory (the Honda folks were very proud that it has a real door, not simply an accordion door as in some small jets) was a bit tight for me, but adequate, and the lavatory ceiling features two skylights that provide a more spacious feel. Overall, the interior reminds me of an upscale Audi; when I mentioned that, the chief interior designer, Chris Osborne, told me that they had tried for a more Euro-style interior. I think they succeeded. The cargo compartment is surprisingly large too. The design manages to get a lot out of a little, without being too obvious about it. Overall, the HondaJet has a sleekness and a friendly, pleasing personality that reminds me of an iPhone, or some other cleverly designed bit of consumer hardware. You just want to like it.
A high degree of automation shows up in the airplane's glass-cockpit approach to controls; the HondaJet is designed to be easy enough to fly that it can get by with a single pilot, also cutting costs. How easy is it to fly? Well, I managed to take off and land, in the simulator, without wrecking it, though I had a few pointers from Honda's chief test pilot, Warren Gould. Still, anything that I can manage is, by definition, user-friendly.
What about the environment, though? Won't all these small jets zipping around be worse for emissions than a few big ones? The answer seems to be no. Based on fuel consumption, speed and range, the HondaJet seems to be just about exactly as efficient per seat-mile as the ubiquitous Canadair CRJ-200 regional jet. But that probably understates things, because if I were flying from Knoxville to, say, Washington, D.C., I'd be traveling a straight-line distance of 353 nautical miles, while if I took a commercial flight, I'd probably be going by way of Atlanta for a distance of 605 nautical miles. (I'd also have a travel time of about an hour on the HondaJet, rather than something like 4 hours traveling via Atlanta.) So while the precise environmental impact of replacing hub-and-spoke commercial travel with direct-flight travel on the HondaJet is open to dispute, it seems unlikely that there will be much impact. There's also a national-security angle: Crashing a 757, or even a Canadair regional jet, into a building would do a lot more damage than crashing a HondaJet into one. It's hard to weigh the importance of this factor, but it's certainly worth noting.
Overall, I found the HondaJet very appealing, and if I had in the neighborhood of $4 million to drop on an airplane I'd be sorely tempted. But since I don't—Popular Mechanics doesn't pay quite that well, and neither does my day job at the university—the real question is whether people who do have the money will shell out. That, obviously, depends. Honda hopes that the plane will sell not only to the usual run of jet customers, but to air-taxi services, and, in fact, Fujino, who makes a point of calling the HondaJet an Advanced Light Jet rather than a Very Light Jet, tells me that they expect this to be a case of the product driving the market. Although other efforts to build an on-demand air-taxi market at low cost have stalled with the current economic downturn, those efforts faced financial and technological problems that Honda expects to avoid, and by the time the HondaJets are rolling off the line at full speed, there's a good chance that the economy will have recovered. So the air-taxi model—where you got to a website, enter your destination, and have a small jet swoop down to pick you up, possibly at a small business airport rather than a big one where parking and security hassles are greater—may well have a chance.
I certainly would like to see something like that happen. I fly coach myself; I'll occasionally spring for an upgrade to first class when the airline offers me a deal, but when I do take the upgrade I'm usually underwhelmed. To me, the problem with air travel as it exists now isn't a lack of free drinks, but a lack of convenient scheduling, and the risk of delays caused by missed connections. (Ironically enough, a trip to Greensboro, N.C., was nearly scrubbed by problems in Atlanta en route). Free drinks are nice, I guess, but when your flight is canceled or delayed, the front part of the plane is just as inconvenienced as the back part of the plane. I'd be much more willing to pay first-class fare for a shorter flight that was more likely to get me there on time.
Are there enough people out there who feel the way I do? Honda thinks there are. Speaking selfishly, I hope they're right.
Source;
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4347867.html?nav=RSS20&src=syn&dom=yah_buzz&mag=pop
Noblesse CR-Z on track at Suzuka
Source (via autoblog);
2011 Honda CR-Z: First Drive
What is it?The CR-Z is an unlikely hero for Honda, the car that could restore at least a little of its sporting image after its withdrawal from F1 and the axing of both the NSX supercar project and the S2000.
The CR-Z is a sports hybrid coupe, the first car with this type of powertrain to get a six-speed manual gearbox. Its styling has strategic cues from the CR-X of the early 1980s, but it also looks modern. In fact, what's appealing about this coupe is that it looks like nothing else on the road; it's instantly recognisable as the CR-Z.
Sitting on a slightly shorter but wider Insight platform, the CR-Z uses a wheelbase that’s shrunk by 115mm, while it has also lost 30mm in height and is 44kg lighter.
The CR-Z does not just employ a revised version of the Insight’s platform, its Integrated Motor Assist (IMA) system and a modified Insight rear suspension set-up. Wanting to enhance performance, engineers replaced the Insight’s 1.3-litre petrol engine with the 1.5-litre i-VTEC motor from the Jazz, then mated that to a revised six-speed manual transmission lifted out of the European-spec 1.8-litre Civic.
The combined power output of the CR-Z’s hybrid system is 122bhp at 6000rpm, while combined torque is 128lb ft at 1500rpm. Our Japan-spec car offered a combined 58mpg. Oh, and by the way, the CR-Z still employs nickel metal hydride batteries.
What's it like?
Slip into the driver’s seat and you'll sense how much lower you sit in the CR-Z than in an Insight. There’s plenty of headroom for driver’s up to 194cm, but forget the rear seats, which would struggle to hold a 12-year old. Interior trim and quality are superior to the Insight's, and the instrumentation boasts more design flair. Flatten the rear seats and you create 401 litres of luggage space, enough for a couple of suitcases or two golfbags.
The IMA system offers three driving modes: sport, which uses the electric motor to aid acceleration, and normal and econ, which retard throttle response to reduce fuel consumption and lower emissions.
The first thing you notice is the CR-Z’s beefy bottom-end torque. With maximum torque on tap from just 1500rpm, the coupe jumps from rest and reaches 60mph in 9sec, as you clear the 6300rpm redline in second. It's noticeably faster than the Insight.
Keep the engine spinning between 4000rpm and 6000rpm and the CR-Z will reward any right-foot extension, while the specially tuned throatier exhaust adds to the all-new sporty hybrid experience.
After trying all three modes, we found ourselves leaving the CR-Z in sport; it offers quicker response at both low and high speeds and suits the characteristics of this car perfectly.
With world-beating manual gearboxes like those in the S2000, NSX and Civic Type R, the CR-Z had a lot to live up to. And thanks to some inspired revision on the European Civic’s gearbox, the CR-Z’s six-speed delivers deliciously short throws and a firm, precise linkage action.
Honda paid special attention to steering too. It's superbly weighted, has excellent feel and turns in on a penny. Combined with enhanced rigidity throughout the chassis and bodyshell, a significant revision to the torsion bar set-up on the rear suspension is another reason why the car handles and rides so well. The CR-Z is stiff but compliant.
The CR-Z’s main braking system is hydraulic, and it uses the regenerative braking only as an ‘assist mechanism’. The result is refreshing; unlike the current crop of hybrids, which deliver a somewhat synthetic feel, the CR-Z offers sure-footed stopping power every time.
Should I buy one?
Honda is convinced that it has launched this coupe at the right time, and it may have a point. With its low-slung, sporty looks, high interior quality, good performance and fuel economy, great gearbox and low price, the CR-Z should spice up interest in hybrids, and force a wider cross-section of the motoring public to pay attention to this type of vehicle. Watch out for the high performance Mugen version in 2011, too.
Peter Lyon
Source;
http://www.autocar.co.uk/CarReviews/FirstDrives/Honda-CR-Z-1.5-i-VTEC-GT/248133/
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