Honda in trouble

With Toyota out of the running because of mass recalls and the Detroit Big 3 struggling, Honda should have seen its market share grow and sales increase in America. However, things didn’t turn out so good for the Japanese carmaker, as its retail share looks sure to be down this year.

According to a recent autonews article, Honda’s sales in the US are up 4 percent in November. While that might not sound bad, when you consider the whole market is up 11 percent in the same month, you begin to understand just how bad the situation looks. "Honda is not riding the wave," Lincoln Merrihew, managing director of Compete Automotive, told autonews.

Partly to blame for this are the Civic and CR-V (which are in the final year of their product cycle) and the Accord - 18 months from a redesign. But the newly introduced models are not doing any better. Take the Insight hybrid for example, which is falling 40,000 units short of the most conservative sales estimates. Outsold 8 to 1 by the Toyota Prius, Honda has only managed to shift 19,325 units through November, while the company originally targeted sales of 60,000 to 80,000.

It’s a similar story with the Crosstour, of which Honda has sold 20,000 fewer than its biggest competitor, the Toyota Venza. Although it hasn't been on the market for too long, early sales for Honda's new CR-Z hybrid coupe aren't any more encouraging. Autonews reports that Honda had conservatively intended to sell around 15,000 of the two-seat hybrids per year. However, only 4,373 have made their way off of dealer lots and another 3,000 are currently sitting in inventory.

Honda’s slow sales indicate that the company is playing it safe with the newer models, needing to invest more energy to develop cars that customers really want. We think the Japanese company should return to its driver-oriented engineering and forget about this new-age green technology for technology’s sake.