All images: Honda

The Geneva Motor Show is less than a month away, and Honda has big plans. You remember that incredible, retro-looking Urban EV Concept that debuted in Frankfurt in 2017. Well, a prototype “inspired by” that will show its face in Geneva, and Honda just showed off an image of its interior. Check it out.


First, here’s a look at the interior that debuted at Frankfurt in the concept car. The coolest bits were the huge screen, the bench seat (!), the screen on the door, and the wacky, single-spoke steering wheel:


And now, here’s the new interior, which Honda showed off today on its media site:

It’s similar. We can’t see if there’s a screen on the door, but the dash image shows a long horizontal piece of wood and a giant screen in the center just like what we saw in the Urban EV Concept. But gone are the two little knobs on the wood, the fun steering wheel has been replaced with a traditional three-spoke (I can’t see the third spoke, but it’s almost certainly a three-spoke), and below the wood trim we can see what looks like some fairly normal looking plastic trim and some buttons in a center stack.

I fear that this center stack might stretch down and back into a center console, taking the space that would otherwise be legroom for a center passenger. Honda, please, no—we need a small car with a bench seat!


That interior show above belongs to a “compact electric vehicle prototype” (we saw an “early design sketch” of it last month) that was apparently “inspired by the Urban EV Concept,” so how much this car will share with that concept is anyone’s guess, but the more the merrier. Because that concept was sweet. It’s also not clear how production feasible this prototype will be.

We’ll find out on 5 March at the Geneva Motor Show. I expect to see a bench seat, dammit.