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Originally Posted by zigzagz94
You may be right but judging from the license plates in the background of the newest spy shots it is testing in the states. Seems like a lot of effort on Honda's part to have both a coupe and roadster version of a car that isn't going to see the light of day. It's all speculation, but all the other Japanese makes are showing sports car concepts at Tokyo this year and I'm guessing this will be Honda's "surprise".
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If this sees the light of day in the US for street use I'll gladly make you a bet that I will buy you one, what are you putting up? The KTM XBow was 60 million US to develop. It will never be sold in the US officially. There are a few here through the grey market for track day cars, but that is it. Honda likes the profit of stamping out Civics with nice profit margins, people should be thankful they make a hotrod version of that from time to time, but they are not overly interested in flexing their engineering muscles. From time to time they show off what they can do, but they mostly play it safe when it comes to product development. They made their first side by side and personal watercraft 10 years after the competition and they made the Fury 10 years after they should have. They can go wild, like the NR or the RC213 V-S, but they normally play it safe.
This vehicle is really cool, but it is so far away from what DOT regulations would allow, ridiculously far away.
Besides, Honda did not do this, a design firm did it. They might have been hired by Honda or went rouge and just used Honda as a platform. Somewhere else on this forum I mentioned that the best designs come from small teams or individuals, not a collective corporate group.
The difference between this and the street going Slingshot does not look that dramatic, but one only has to look at the product development of Polaris Industries compared to Honda to see the risks each company are willing to take. Look at each companies side by side offering. Polaris is still fighting at the state level in certain areas to get the Slingshot officially approved as a street vehicle (and what it is specifically) Honda wants ZERO part of that stuff. For every Slingshot that is sold Honda probably sells 10,000 Civics.
This little Honda is a cool auto show attention getter, it ends there.