Clarkson begins his somewhat tongue-in-cheek critique:
It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.
For reasons known only to itself, Honda has fitted the Insight with something called a constantly variable transmission (CVT).
It doesn’t work. Put your foot down in a normal car and the revs climb in tandem with the speed. In a CVT car, the revs spool up quickly and then the speed rises to match them. It feels like the clutch is slipping. It feels horrid.
This is a complaint made by some first time drivers of other hybrid vehicles. However, we suspect that Clarkson may be exaggerating just a wee bit - well, maybe exaggerating a whole lot.
Anyway, we have heard previous complaints that driving a hybrid can give the operator the feeling that pressing down hard on the accelerator is like pressing on a wet sponge - not much happens immediately.
One man went so far as to say he wondered if the carmaker expected the radiator fan to pull the car forward like an airplane propeller.
Back to the Clarkson critique. He hates the sound of the car!
The Honda’s gasoline engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full throttle, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner.
Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.
Dog on a ham slicer indeed. Why don’t you tell us how you really feel about the car Mr. Clarkson?
Continuing with his review of the Honda Insight:
So you’re sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you’re doing only 23mph because that’s about the top speed, and you’re thinking things can’t get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit.
In a Prius the electric motor can, though almost never does, power the car on its own. In the Honda the electric motor is designed to “assist” the gasoline engine, providing more get-up-and-go when the need arises.
The net result is this: in a Prius the transformation from electricity to gasoline is subtle. In the Honda there are all sorts of jerks and clunks.
Mr. Clarkson says you could buy a VW Golf diesel, which will be even more economical and hasn’t been built out of rice paper to keep costs down.
Though he tends to exaggerate his criticisms, one would need to test drive the Honda Insight - after driving a Prius - to really know.
The full review can be found here.
A picture of my cave
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