The Honda Insight knows how to make a drink last. Eighty three miles per gallon is just the official figure for its petrol consumption. Someone took one on a round-Britain trip recently and averaged a truly tear-inducing 103 miles per gallon. Clearly, if you resent buying petrol, the Insight is the car of your dreams.
That said, does anyone dream of cars that look like the Insight? Apart, possibly, from Gerry Anderson: you could imagine Captain Scarlet swinging around in one of these on his day off. The Insight is deeply retro, as visions of the future tend to be. Someone seems to have taken the front end of a Fiat Punto, sat on it, and then welded it to the rear of an old Citroën and the whole has the air of something that might be nice when it's finished.
It certainly looks experimental, though, and the experiment in question is with power sources. The Insight is powered partly by petrol and partly by electricity. It has a petrol engine in the front and an electric motor in the back, working together in petrol-saving harmony. In the future, when we're scraping the barrel for oil, everyone is going to wish they had bought an Insight, or something like it.
Hybrid cars are not in themselves new. General Motors made one - the Impact - 10 years ago; more recently, Toyota toyed with something called a Prius. But Honda are the first to make a hybrid car you can drive off a dealer's forecourt. And you can do so safe in the knowledge that, simply by buying an Insight, you are making Japan a poorer place; the company claims it is losing around £4,000 on each model sold. Such is their commitment to getting hybrid cars on the road and into our hearts.
Production of the Insight resulted in the registering of 300 separate patents. However you look at it, that's an awful lot of new things. But then the creation of a viable, mass-market electric car poses an awful lot of problems. Obviously the technology has been in place for years to power a car with a battery. The problem was the battery needed to be the size of your sitting room. Then there was the question of the battery running out while you were on a motorway, say, or a hill, or simply a long way from the nearest branch of John Menzies. On top of all that, a general feeling lingered about the electric car that no matter how cunningly you grappled with the logistics, it was always going to look and drive like a drugged-up milk float.
Into this design minefield Honda unflinchingly marched, brandishing devious calculations relating to space and weight. The Insight's slimline batteries fit neatly in the boot and you don't have to tow them around in a separate trailer. Nor do you ever need to take the car home and plug it in overnight. When you accelerate, the electric motor lends a helping hand. While you slow down, the motor is busy recharging its batteries.
And surprisingly for a vehicle which shares a power source with the Unigate fleet, the Insight is extremely comfortable to sit in - firm and roomy. It's a two-seater but it's a shade more practical than the average sports car. Behind the seats lies what is, in effect, the largest parcel shelf in history. It extends right to the tail of the car and offers a plausible space for a few suitcases, a bag of golf clubs or even a medium-sized dog. These things will entirely block your already awkwardly diminished view from the rear-view mirror. But the chances are you won't be doing much looking at the road, anyway. You'll be concentrating on the petrol consumption figures, handily updating all the time in a display on the toy-like dashboard.
There is probably no lighter vehicle on the road that isn't a bicycle. Most of the Insight's body is made out of aluminium and the bits that aren't are made out of nylon composite. Thus the car weighs little more than the airbag on a Grand Jeep Cherokee. This means it whips along, even with its unglamorous 1-litre engine, though there is an unnerving downside. The feel of the doors as you open them put me in mind of something that I couldn't quite place at first, though I got there eventually: Coke cans. Of course, they're stronger than that, but even so, at the wheel of the Insight, I couldn't help feeling more than averagely queasy about the prospect of a collision.
Honda insist, though, that "weight reduction has not been achieved at the cost of collision safety". Indeed, the company maintains that "compared with a conventional steel body, the new structure can successfully absorb a 50% greater load and in a more stable fashion". Having failed to hit or be hit by anything in the Insight, I'll take their word for it.
While remaining alive to the hilarious contradictions that automatically beset the notion of an "eco-friendly car", one has to be in awe of Honda's serious-minded commitment to the green cause. Aluminium can be quite simply recycled. The Insight itself uses some recycled - and upgraded - material, and presumably, by extension, it is not necessarily the destiny of your Insight, as it is the destiny of most other cars, to be scrunched up into a cube and piled in a yard on the outskirts of Reading. Parts of it can be melted down and redeployed as cake tins, or whatever.
And think of all the petrol you'll have saved for the rest of the world to use. One drawback: even at £4,000 shy of break-even for Honda, £17,000 might be too high a price to pay for a clear conscience. But at least the batteries are included.
The lowdown
Honda Insight
Price: £17,000
Acceleration: 0-62 in 12 seconds
Top speed: 112mph
Consumption: 83 mpg (combined)
