Yesterday was an important day to Honda Japan. That market received the third member of their N-Series vehicles, right after N Box and N Box +. The very first glance at N-One could label it as only one more kei car, a very famous category at that country, and in fact it doesn’t deny that. However, this hatchback not only avoids one strong feature of those cars as takes the opportunity to make Honda’s debut at another kind of cars, this one very well-accepted worldwide. You can discover all about that by reading this article.
Kei cars became popular in Japan due to their particular needs. Their main characteristic is the very compact size, which leads to require smaller engines and ending at a cheaper final price. This kind of car emerged after the Second World War, when Japan was starting to reconstruct itself but its population still couldn’t afford many luxuries, such as a full-size car. The kei-cars’ first utility was related to providing simple and non-expensive transportation to people and companies but bringing the cars’ advantages in relation to motorcycles. Since that time the Japanese government gave tax privileges to those cars in exchange of respecting conditions such as engine and size limits – for instance, the first kei engines couldn’t be bigger than 150 cc. But the following years saw frequent increases of those limits in order to stimulate the automakers to invest more on them, and the results came gradually. Daihatsu, Honda, Suzuki and Subaru, among many others, developed better vehicles and started to estabilish a concrete market around those cars, which by that time started to gain at sophistication. This category survived the following years with ups and downs, but their cars received items such as turbo engines, automatic transmission and even full traction.
The latest upgrade received by the kei cars is exactly what N-One brings under its little hood, a 660 cc engine. Today they became much more an urban need than an emergency solution like decades ago, due to the fact that if Japan has already fully rebuilt itself, now it deals with an increasing number of people living at the same area than before. That’s what makes the kei cars attractive still in nowadays, because they now represent one compact way of transportation and without leaving the initial low-cost premise. However, if the Japanese are very used to see lots of those cars every day, they surely join the Western opinion that the kei cars aren’t any design-contest winners. But this doesn’t come as a complaint at this case because the prevailing feeling is admiration. Those cars always look like little boxes because they do their best to still offer the best internal space possible, which implies forgetting exterior volumes and reliefs that would take more space – those cars need to be small and offer a reasonable cabin, so everything else is compressed. N-One still can’t be acclaimed as some sort of sexy car, but it takes inspiration from the 1960s N360, one of the very first Honda kei cars. That’s why the new line is called N-Series: Honda not only releases a new hatchback as enters at the worldwide famous retro car trend, captained by Fiat 500, Mini Cooper and VW Beetle.
Besides the small size, N-One takes inspiration at the design, showing a nice reinterpretation of that car which used very small lights and the typical Japanese rearview mirrors of that time, fixed next to the front end. However, the new car has all the technology used by its brand in nowadays, and this is reflected specially at the interior, which boasts a big central touchscreen to control functions such as the sound system or some driving parameters. N-One’s 0.66 uses three cylinders with option of turbo, and can also bring full traction – according to the company, the most powerful can compete with an 1.3’s performance. It would be really nice for Honda to have their own car among the retro category, due to the increasing sales generated by those participants and the more modern ones, like Audi A1, Citroën DS3 and Opel Adam. However, the restriction of being a kei car is stronger than the stimulus of entering a worldwide prosper category: those cars follow standards only important in Japan. Offering a car that small would put N-One in drawback against more spacious and sophisticated rivals, whose public doesn’t mind paying more for it. That’s why the kei cars have never achieved success at the attempts of leaving their homeland, and why N-One probably won’t try to break this implicit rule. But the more optimistic car fans can always hope that Honda decides to reinterpretate a Western car to sell it at the rest of the world.