Lots of announcements from Honda
Even though there are no pictures to show, Honda has announced its future plans, confirming that the near future will see a new Honda Civic Type R sports hatchback launched, which has been under development and is expected to be introduced in 2015.
The model will be based around the European market model and it will be specifically designed for the European market, but obviously this doesn’t mean it won’t see release in Japan. Now that may be worthy of a news article however, more interesting is the fact that the company’s CEO, Takanobu Ito stated that the new Type R will be developed in order to become the fastest front-wheel-drive vehicle on the Nurburgring race track.
2013 is expected to see a replacement for the Fit – or the Jazz as it is known in Europe, and within the following two years after the initial presentation of that new model, they’ll launch a small SUV model based around that architecture, as well as a replacement for the City sedan.
For North America, Honda plans to produce the Fit and a derivative model – probably the small SUV we mentioned earlier – at its Mexico plant which is expected to start operation in spring 2014. Another confirmation that the CEO brought was that the new all-new Acura RLX sedan will make its debut at the 2012 Los Angeles Auto Show – which will take place towards the end of November 2012.
The announcements continued with mentions of a new sports car which will launch in Japan in 2014, besides the scheduled NSX. There is very little known about this future open-top model, however it is rumored that it may be inspired by the rear-wheel drive EV-STER.
The CEO also mentioned that Honda plans to produce six new mini-vehicle models for the Japanese market by the end of 2015, starting with a very retro-inspired N-ONE in November of 2012.
Honda also promised to launch an all-new fuel cell electric model in most of its markets starting with 2015, and have also confirmed the development of a lightweight and compact one-motor hybrid system meant to garner them the number one fuel economy for hybrid vehicles; they also have a more powerful two-motor hybrid system in the works as well.
