We can guess what some of you are thinking: "Look at that! Honda went and built a Prius!"
Not necessarily. Honda's Insight hybrid actually came to these shores before the Toyota Prius. It even had the high rear hatch with the vertical peek-a-boo glass panel between the taillights from Day One. That no one remembers this is due to the fact that the original Insight was a weird-looking 2-seater that was impractical for the masses. Honda sold only 18,000 of them worldwide over a 6-year run.
Understandably, Honda wanted its new Insight to have broad-based appeal. They wanted to build a hybrid that didn't harbor any eccentricities. And they wanted to sell some 90,000 of them per year. To do this they had to morph the Insight into a 4-door, 5-passenger machine. The 2010 Honda Insight you see above is the result. But comparisons to the Toyota Prius are inevitable. How would this new Insight measure-up to the current king-of-the-hill? We recently pitted the two against each other to find out.
Final pricing for the 2010 Honda Insight won't be released until we get closer to the April 22, 2009 on-sale date, but an Insight is expected to go for several thousand less than a comparably-equipped 2009 Toyota Prius. In this case, the desire to compare on an equivalent equipment basis means we've matched the top-level 2010 Honda Insight EX Navi against a 2009 Toyota Prius with package #5 -- loaded, but without leather seats.
We put these cars head-to-head at our test track, compared them back-to-back on the road and ran them nose-to-tail through the same 197-mile fuel economy test loop. Then we poked, prodded and evaluated them side-by-side using our 27-point evaluation sheet. And yes, we also factored-in the expected price difference. After crunching all of that data, which of these dedicated hybrids do you suppose came out on top?
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