2019 Honda Insight

CARLOS LAGO: It may look like the lovechild of the Honda Accord and the Honda Civic, but the new 2019 Honda Insight is a hybrid that delivers up to 55 miles per gallon. Are it's nice looks and premium interior enough to take away from the Toyota Prius and Hyundai Ionic? That's what we're going to find out on this first drive. The first thing you notice when you start driving the Honda Insight is that it doesn't feel very hybrid-y. What I like about what Honda has done here is they haven't subscribed to the idea that all hybrids need to feel obviously like hybrids, they need to sound obviously like hybrids. Instead, Honda has just taken essentially what amounts to a nicely option-upgraded and built Civic that happens to be a hybrid. And they've called it the Insight. That's kind of a reductive way of putting it, but I'll try to explain what I experience as I drive this. When you roll on to the accelerator pedal, you have a hybrid power train, which consists of a 1.5 liter engine that generates electricity for an electric motor and a battery. The engine only powers the front tires when you need heavy throttle, heavy acceleration, or you're traveling at freeway speeds. There are some complexities there that you can actually read out with one of the displays in the gauge cluster that shows you when the engine is actually driving the wheels, but for the most part you're relying on the battery and the electric motor. The battery itself is pretty small, 1.1 kilowatt hours, but it doesn't need to be that big because it doesn't need to store a terrific amount of energy with the engine always feeding it. You're not plugging this thing in, you've always got the engine generating electricity for it. And the nice thing about this operation is it isn't quite like an extreme plug-in hybrid, but it does give you some advantages that electric motors bring. Namely, the immediacy of power delivery, and the smoothness, especially at low-speed acceleration. As I come to a stop here, let some traffic in, start to roll on the accelerator pedal. I feel that similar immediate on-rush of acceleration that feels good. We're not dealing with a terrific amount of power here, 151 horsepower, 197 pound feet of torque or so, net, from the entire hybrid system, but the initial acceleration from a stop sign or a stoplight feels strong enough. It kind of peters out as you start making your way up to freeway speeds, and you hear the engine start to rev up as if it were connected to a continuously variable transmission. It's not, but that's what the experience feels like to most drivers. There is actually no transmission connecting the engine to anything. There's a couple of gears that drive the electric motor and the generator unit, but you don't really notice any of that from behind the wheel, and that's what really matters. Similar is true with the brake pedal. It controls the amount of regenerative braking you get from the electric motor, that's when it spins backwards and starts slowing you down when you lift off the accelerator, and it also controls the physical brakes that actually do the work of biting on the brake rotors and slowing you down. Transitioning between those two tasks can be difficult, but fortunately, with this pedal, you don't really notice it. We've covered a lot about what you don't notice while driving. Well, what do you notice? Well, you have a nice, accurate steering wheel, you've got good visibility through the forward, side, and the rear glass. You notice, though, when you come to a stop and you're rolling the accelerator, while that initial acceleration, like we mentioned, is strong, the longer you stay in it, the more you hear that engine. And that's kind of like what you'd expect from a vehicle with a continuously variable transmission, or a CVT. And that experience could be unappealing to some. It doesn't sound that great when you hear the engine revving to a consistent RPM and just sort of hanging out there. And it doesn't get much better when you put the car in sport mode. Yes, it has a sport mode. And it makes the engine even a little bit louder, because that's what, traditionally, a sport mode should do. But I don't know if that really makes sense in a Honda Insight that's intended to get 55 miles per gallon in the city. Sport mode also does a curious thing, which we'll talk about in a second. First, we have to talk about the shift pedals right here, which you would think are shift pedals. They're not. They control the amount of regenerative braking the Insight delivers. And you can go to a maximum of three on the extreme side of regenerative braking. That is enough to actually make the brake lights come on. And, interestingly, Honda's decided to make this a temporary setting. So you can dial in, I want the most regenerative braking you could possibly deliver, but after a few seconds, or after you come to a complete stop, it resets back to default. I wish it would just stay in one setting, and it does when you put the car in sport mode, but there are other downsides with that. When I asked Honda, Honda said they wanted the experience to be as similar to a normal vehicle, a normal, non-hybrid car, as possible. That's why it behaves like a CVT. That's why you don't get the very obvious hybrid driving experience when you drive this. And because of that, they wanted to make the regenerative braking consistent, and always default to a default setting. I prefer to just enable a braking setting and leave it there. And overall, the driving experience is very similar to that of just a very nice Honda Civic. That's a good thing. And a lot of these cars come standard with the usual array of Honda safety equipment like Adaptive Cruise, Lane Keep Assist, all Lane Departure Warning, and so on and so forth. What's interesting, though, is you don't get blind spot monitoring in this car. What you do get is Honda's LaneWatch system. And that's when you turn your turn signal on, you get a view of a camera positioned on the side view mirror in the center display. I'm not a big fan of this system. I like a simple blind spot monitoring system, because when that display is on, you can't see your navigation prompts, you can't see any of your entertainment functions. If you're lost in a city, you have to find a way to quickly turn off that display in order to get back to the map when you're trying to find your way around town. It's a matter of preference. And Honda says some consumers really enjoy the feature. So, again, that's another thing that's left up to shoppers to decide if they want it. This car intends to attract people who want a hybrid, want the fuel economy benefits, but maybe don't want to feel like they're driving something that's so obviously a hybrid. You can think of this as just a nice car that's in the $25,000 to $28,000 range, this one's about $28,000, that also happens to be a hybrid. Obviously you're not going to care about driving fast if you're looking at a car that does above 50 miles per gallon. And if that's in your wheelhouse, I think you will really appreciate how nice this car looks inside, how useful it is, and how simply it drives. I think Honda's been very smart in that area. I quite like driving this. Let's stop talking about hybrid stuff and start talking about what the rest of the interior offers. This is a high-class looking, smartly laid out interior that relays the premium feel that you won't get in similarly-priced hybrid, compact sedans. I like this entertainment display. It supports Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in the second and third highest trim levels. The gauge cluster is attractive, the center console is neat and smart. The dash is full of these really nice looking, nice to touch materials with real stitching. It's stuff that you won't typically see in hybrids that cost around this much. One of the most clever parts about this is not the hybrid setup, it's this center console area. This is a really deep space that has a lot of configurations, from the way you can slide the arm rest and move it back, to the various ways you can move the cup holders inside. And I also like, too, this little pad right here with the rubberized bottom. I can slide my phone, it's a Google Pixel Plus, it's the big one. And it fits with plenty of room to spare, and with also space for the cable that I can plug in, run Android Auto, and still have the phone hanging out right there. When it comes to hybrid-specific stuff, there's not a lot here to tell you that it's a hybrid unless you have the digital gauge cluster, at least the left side of it, arranged to show you how the power is being distributed between the motor, the engine, and the drive wheels. You can kind of largely ignore it and just drive this car as a normal vehicle, and that seems to be the intent of this car. The effect is you can hop in and drive this like any normal car and not really notice that it's doing anything different until you get to the gas pump and see that you're not buying that much in fuel. One of the challenges with designing a hybrid is figuring out where to put the battery pack. You want to place it where it doesn't impinge on cargo or interior space. Now for the Insight, Honda has put it underneath the rear seat, and that means that your 15 cubic foot or so of storage space isn't impacted. And it gets even larger when you flip down the rear seats. What I really like about the Honda Insight, if I haven't said enough already, is that it doesn't feel obviously like a hybrid, even if it gets to reap the benefits of one. Versus the Toyota Prius and the Hyundai Ionic, that really gives it an advantage in my mind. And it's worth a much closer look if you're in the market for a new hybrid. If you like what you see, keep it tuned right here, and be sure to visit edmunds.com.