Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin



Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Honda

Honda

Honda

Honda

Honda

Volkswagen provided three nights in a hotel and air travel from Washington, DC, to Frankfurt for this story.

FRANKFURT, GERMANY—Two years ago, Honda arguably stole the Frankfurt auto show with its Urban EV concept car. That delightful little electric car was reminiscent of Hondas past, like the N600 and S800, but updated for a carbon-free future. At the 2019 Frankfurt show, it went one better, revealing the production version called the Honda e (which starts at about €30,000 including incentives). And while others were swooning over the new Land Rover, this little battery-electric car completely and utterly won my heart. And I think it's a crying shame it won't go on sale here in the US.

It’s not for everyone

Let's be clear about this to stem pages of complaints: I realize the Honda e is not a "one car does it all" solution. At just 153 inches (3,894mm) long, it's a very small car by US standards. Its lithium-ion battery pack is just 35.5kWh and provides a WLTP-calculated range of 138 miles (220km), so stop reading here if your commute to work is more than 50 miles each way. It's not even particularly fast, although it is rear-wheel drive, with either 100kW (134hp) or 113kW (151hp) motors as options and a 0-62mph (100km/h) time of eight seconds. And there are definitely no promises that it will go out at night and earn you money while you sleep.

No, this is a battery-electric vehicle with a definite niche, for people who live in cities where journeys are measured in time rather than distance. A niche that BMW has tapped into nicely with the i3. And like the i3, I'm pretty sure that charming—some might say quirky—styling will go a long way in moving metal off forecourts.

About that styling. "A design is also very much dependent on the concept and the purpose, the direction of the product itself," Honda designer Kohei Hitomi told me. "So, for a sporty concept, you need a sporty design, a dynamic design. And for the Honda e in particular, It also had a special mission to actually be introduced as the first electric vehicle from Honda, which is also implementing the latest advanced technologies. So It had to be a very comprehensive but also very friendly design to approach the customer in a very friendly manner."

However, this does not appear to be a case of function following form. The car's layout, with the power electronics ahead of the battery pack and the electric motor at the rear, powering the rear wheels, was chosen to maximize the e's agility around town. "If we talk about agility, it's about how efficiently you can actually bring down the torque and how small your turning radius is," Hitomi told me. "Both can be realized with a rear-wheel drive; you can actually bring down the torque very efficiently by having the rear wheels driven. Right at acceleration you have all the dynamic weight distribution to the rear, and with no driveshafts for the front wheels you can actually turn them at up to 50 degrees, realizing that extremely small turning radius of 4.3 meters (14.1 feet), which is comparable to a Smart car or something like that."

Now these are virtual mirrors I could live with

Some of the design touches—like the hood-mounted charging port or the side view cameras in place of traditional mirrors—might be thought of as experiments or pilot studies, which may well show up in future electric Hondas. Speaking of those side cameras, Hitomi's team appears to have a better implementation of the idea than we found with the Audi e-tron last December . Instead of embedding the screens into the door cards, they're located at the base of each A pillar. "It was an obligatory requirement to have that location for monitoring system for the side mirrors right from the start. We never considered any other location other than that, because from an ergonomic perspective it's just natural that if you turn to the left, you always look at the pillar on the left side," Hitomi told Ars.

Unfortunately, like Volkswagen's ID.3 electric hatchback, there are no plans to bring the Honda e here, even if we do have tens of millions of people living in dense urban cities (on both coasts and in the middle, too), some of whom even buy cars. Hitomi-san told me that Honda in Japan was rebuffed by its North American operation when the suggestion was made to bring the e over to the US. Maybe what we need is an old-fashioned letter-writing campaign.

Listing image by Jonathan Gitlin