Honda’s simpler days…

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 They even said it on their ads: “We make it simple”.
They also looked simple. In a good way. I mean look at all of these!

Honda used to be special, in that simple way. Which helped them acquire a huge following in the US.
Now they are just another popular brand. They designs are overly complicated.
Too many lines everywhere, chrome bits, fake grilles and vents. It borderlines on the vulgar.

Look at the cars above. The first Accord was great! And only a hatchback for a while.
Even the early Civics. And the tiny “coupe” was a complete original.

There is a little bit of hope in these recent concepts. They “say” Honda.
The small Urban EV above will see production in a coupe of years.
Let’s hope the Sports EV follows suit.

And especially, let’s hope they inspire there designs of the next generation Civic and Accord.

Conversation 9 comments

  1. The EV concepts are beautiful, clean and simple! One look at them and you know it's a Honda. If future Honda's keep this DNA in their style the future looks bright again for Honda.

  2. Vince, I agree with you. The accord was a fantastic industrial design object. Quality, elegant simplicity, classy but rigorous. A way topically Honda. I'm still in love with Honda but the chrome messy of the latest design make my love a struggle. The new Tokyo prototype is a big hope for the future. A new generation of Honda simple and clean in design and at the same level of the technological contents. A Honda that I can desire again and a promising path for the future.

  3. Vince, please give an example of a current car design that looks both simple and great, and not simple and boring?

  4. My future wife at the time and I had one of the first Accords in 1976. It had stick shift which neither of us knew how to use but was so easy to shift and operate that we had it down very quickly. The thing I remember was people coming up to us all of the time to ask about the car. It was so different than anything else that was out at that time.

  5. My first car was that gen 1 Accord 3 door hatch. It was such a good little car, simple to work on, light and chuckable. Tyres were suicidally skinny though.

  6. I would argue jaguar has mastered simple but great design. Proof that beauty can come from one character line as opposed to overdone flair.

  7. The Jaguar F-Type and F-Pace are great designs, but the current generation XE and XF have lost much of the Jaguar design DNA, and the current XJ was outdated before it even went on sale (though the interior design has aged better than the newer Jag sedans interiors have).

  8. Had an 86 hatchback. Drove like a sports car, hauled like a pickup truck, 30mpg all day long. Put 245,000 miles on it with no major problems.

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