Honda to push harder than ever to win the hybrid marketplace. It plans to sell 200k cheap hybrids a year,and a total of 500k hybrids globally. This is a huge push and I can’t wait to see hybrids just be the norm out there in the automotive world.

Honda plans to launch a cheaper hybrid car to go on sale from early next year.

The maker says it expects to sell 200,000 of the entry level hybrid cars a year, although we don’t know if they will be available in Australia.

Honda says the cheaper hybrid will allow more people around the world to adopt cleaner motoring technology and reduce global car emissions.

It anticipates total sales of 500,000 hybrids a year. As well as the new affordable hybrid, Honda will build a Jazz hybrid and sporty CR-Z and Civic hybrids. It plans to reduce its production costs with a new electronic control unit and a thinner, more compact battery. A thinner motor has also been developed.

Source: The Age

A Popsci contributor had an experiment. Test out Honda’s Natural Gas Powered Vehicle then sell it on Ebay. His results are an eye opener.

I did some research, and found that compressed-natural-gas vehicles are fetching big premiums online in places like Utah and Oklahoma where natural-gas prices are ridiculously low—as low as 60-cents per gallon. When I listed the car on eBay, it sold three days later to someone in Oklahoma for $18,600, about $4,000 more than what I paid for the car when I purchased it from Honda less than a year before, and $2,000 above its Kelley Blue Book value. (The sale price to me reflected various state and federal tax incentives that Honda took when they owned it.)

Who’d have thought that the highest-performing investment of my entire year would be a used Honda Civic? We loved owning the car, and will miss its greenest-car-on-earth cache. But we realized that living five miles from work is probably better for the environment than living 65 miles from work, no matter what you drive.

Source: PopSci

Across the Pacific over in Japan Honda has been putting in extra effort on the hybrid initiative as they push to knock the Prius off its pedestal by 2010. Along with an improved hybrid image in their designs, Honda is also looking to provide their hybrids with something the Prius and no other hybrid on the market today has achieved: improved highway mileage. While the Prius and other hybrids are great around town and under 40 mph, their highway miles, when the car is running solely on its gasoline motor, are not as compelling. Honda is exploring the use of the Rankine System as a means of harnessing the heat that is typically lost via the cars exhaust and turning it into electricity, and thus electric motor horsepower.

The Rankine System is rather complex and would easier be explained by a Science Professor than a car junky, but here is the nutshell version. The heat produced by the internal combustion engine passes through a cylinder that recaptures that heat and uses it to create steam by passing it through water. The steam is then captured and rotates a turbine that generates electricity. The electricity is then harnessed to produce horsepower for the electric hybrid motors of the car (very nutshell version).

After making a couple stops along the North American Teaser Tour Honda is preparing to take their CR-Z Hybrid over to the Geneva Auto Show, but with a bit more business in mind than just showing off. Word has come out that Europe will be the first to get the new Honda Hybrid some time between 2009 and 2010. This could be yet another devastating blow to the Americans as they seem to be playing second-fiddle to Europe and Asia when it comes to new car releases. It must be foreign auto makers way of “Sticking it to the man,” and it seems that North America is “the Man.”

Honda’s CR-Z Hybrid, which first appeared in Tokyo, carries in its design some genetic breeding to its 80’s ancestor the CRX. Ofcourse in the CR-Z Hybrid you have a gasoline engine that is assisted by an electric motor that is housed between the engine and the transmission. Unfortunately, with this Hybrid setup there will be no all-electric driving option, but hopefully the Hybrid assist will bring the fuel mileage numbers up to the old CRX’s numbers. Even back in the day friends were bragging about achieving 40 to 50 to almost 60mpg. Some of that may have been hyperbole and some of it true, but any of those would be good targets for Honda.    …photo gallery to follow…