Quote:
Originally Posted by Vman455
It is a compromise though. Two-seat cars can only carry two people, and because of this have never sold in large numbers.
Honda already demonstrated that with the original Insight, which fell far short of its sales expectations precisely because Honda misjudged the market by introducing a two-seat hybrid that fell to the four-seat Prius, which outsold it more than 10-to-1 the year it was brought to the US, and more than 148-to-1 by the time Honda finally killed the Insight. .
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There was far more to the insight sales numbers and the Prius is part of it but not what you would expect.
Over the entire Insight production run you could not find a new example in any Wisconsin car dealership, and used examples took several years to arrive.
Our local Honda dealer would berate you and refuse to factory order an insight
The reality was that Toyota set a very low starting price and Honda found itself too expensive in an era of cheap gas.
Internally Honda wanted to only sell a low number of cars and was selling them mainly as engineering experiments because the market price (cough Prius) was to cheap for them to make a profit.
One of my college professors had to fly to California to get an insight because no one would order one for him (2000)
Because definite non market bs was present with the insight I'm not sure we can say it's sales figures are only because of 2 seats.
Look at the number of deposits for the elio?
Also a modern 2 door insight would benefit from modern power electronics being
1/5 the size and battery under half, could likely have 2+2 seating for adults and kids.
Ah well