Toyota will be out in a few months with their 2007 Camry Hybrid. Where is the 2006 HAH?

 

I haven't talked to my Sales Guy in a couple of weeks, but last time I saw him, he said "March at the earliest."

The Camry *is* a cool car - gets about the same gas mileage as the first gen HCH, but...

Look at the stats for the car. Small 4-cyl engine, nowhere near the same horsepower as the Accord. Comparing the two would be like comparing a Corvette and a Corvair.


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Of course I'd *like* to see a mid-range Accord hybrid 4Cyl that would hit about 45mpg combined, price out around $25k. That would bite into the civic business, but would make it more like the pricing structure of the cars back in the early 80s when they were fairly close in price, and the main difference boiled down to whether you needed more interior space in the car. Then let the consumer choose if they want a hi-luxe "performace" car, or a more basic hi-mpg carseat conveyance with cloth seats and fewer percs.


That's a tough sell to the marketing gurus, *especially* the civic team!


Probably the *best* marketing/branding thing that Honda could do right now would be to take a lesson from Saab when they went all-turbo and made that part of their banding statement. Honda could go ALL-hybrid, and then the choices would become trim level, same as with a "regular" car line.

Doing that would (within a few years) significantly bring down the cost of building and developing the hybrid system, because you'd be building it in a larger volume, for all vehicles.

You have about 5 minutes of education with the consumer up front since the car works "exactly" the same driver-wise as a normally aspirated model. After that, it's pure economy over the competition at the pumps.

Imagine a Ridgeline at 35mpg with the same towing capacity as a F150 at 15. Now throw in $3/gallon fuel, and stir.

 

I just did a dealer transfer on 06 HAH the other day and I believe they had two more at the dealership. Am in South Carolina. So they much be on the lots.

 

The 2006 HAH is at the dealers. I picked mine up last Thursday!

 

So is the 2006 EPA mileage really lower than the 2005 model? If so, has anyone asked their dealer for an explanation of what happened or changed?

 

There are several threads explaining the cause of the change fairly definitively. In real life, the change is probably minimal if any.

The cause was that the extra 80ish pounds curb weight punched it into the next category for test setup- different dyno resistance settings when they ran the test. Maybe 1 mpg of it could also be attributed to the PZEV (the HCH took a 1mpg hit between the regular and PZEV versions).

It would be nice to hear the exact breakout from Honda, though.