Honda CR-Z: Rebirth of the CRX

Honda CR-Z: Rebirth of the CRX

Honda has revealed two of the vehicles it will show at the Tokyo Motor Show at the end of the month. One, the Puyo, is a funky little thing that we’ve come to expect from the biannual Tokyo show. It’s a bubble of a car that would fit in nicely with The other is a compact, glass-roof hatchback called the CR-Z.

(Hmm…)

We’ve been expecting a follow-up to the CRX for a while, and some people thought, which was first shown at last year’s Los Angeles Auto Show, even though its designer, Ben Davidson, said at the time that his concept car was only a design study. Thank goodness.

And thankfully, the Remix and the CR-Z share no similar features other than size and a largely glass roof.

Honda isn’t playing coy with the CR-Z, which stands for Compact Renaissance Zero (whatever that means). It is clearly a modern CRX. It might also be the first nostalgic design from a Japanese carmaker. While hardly retro (in comparison to cars like the Mini and Fiat 500), it definitely makes one think of the CRX, a quintessential 1980s car.

Powered by a gas-electric hybrid system (most likely similar to Honda’s current system), the CR-Z is being billed by Honda as a “next-generation lightweight sports car.” With Honda no longer producing a stand-alone purpose-hybrid (like Toyota’s Prius), it seems logical that the CR-Z has a future carrying the high m.p.g. banner. And according to Edmunds.com,

The CR-Z, according to Japanese media reports, is a precursor of a new gas-electric hybrid model that Honda plans to introduce by 2009 in Japan and North America. The company will say only that the concept is a “design research model of a lightweight hybrid sports car.”