Honda has rather high hopes for Chinese green people
Honda motor corp is planing to import the Honda Civic Hybrid into China by the end of year and is aiming for a massive sales of 400 units in 2008. China Car Times would like to say that we’ve only ever seen TWO Toyota Prius’ on the roads in China, FAW must have lost a lot of money on those 300,000rmb electric toys (you can get a top end mid sized luxury sedan for that money)
Mitsuru Ozaki, the general manager of Dongfeng-Honda even went as far as saying selling the hybrid Civic is a loss making business in China.
“Chinese consumers may walk away because of its high price,” Ozaki admitted. “It’s really a money-losing business.”
So why bother selling it anyway?
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I really do not understand why manufacturers insist on forcing this expensive technology on the general public. We have plenty of Toyota Prius cars running around Melbourne. Most of them are either local government fleet cars, (government got to be seen to be doing their bit to appease the ‘greens’)or they are registered as company vehicles.
No private motorist in his right mind would contemplate owning one of these vehicle unless he was cash rich and did not care too much about the true cost of ownership of one of these vehicles.
Has anyone considered how much it will cost to change the battery packs in one of these cars after they have completed their designed life? it has got to be close on the 3rd of the value of the vehicle. That is it’s value new. Not going to be such a viable option after 3 or 4 years, is it? when you factor in that the residual value will probably be around 55% to 65% of it’s new car price.
Pretty tough argument when you could spend your hard earned cash on a good state of the art diesel engined car and have a load of cash spare to do other thing with.
It’s not just diesels, some petrol models even outperform the hybrids. Also hybrids are damn dangerous. Nearly got hit by one in Tokyo as I couldn’t hear it behind me. Then again maybe I shouldn’t have been walking in the street! I’ve seen a few more than two Prius cars in China but they are certainly not popular here. It’s pretty strange that Roewe (or Shanghai as it was branded) even bothered producing a hybrid 750, albeit a demonstrator.