Honda has been like a provincial cinema waiting for the blockbusters to come to town for the last few years. Now it’s all happening at once.
Extensively updated versions of the Civic and CR-V are already on release, and in fairly short order, the new Civic Type R, Jazz and HR-V will join them. Then the NSX arrives at the end of the year.
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For European markets, it has been an immensely frustrating time. The Jazz has been on sale in Japan, where it is known as the Fit, for around two years, and in America [built in a new plant in Mexico) for not much less. The Type R was being openly talked about (and driven in prototype form by journalists) at the last Tokyo show in late 2013. And the build-up to the NSX seems to have been going on forever.
Those frustrations are perfectly summed up by Leon Brannan, the head of cars for Honda UK. British drivers soak up 42% of Civic Type R output for Europe, for instance, yet the market has been deprived of one for five years. The NSX was discontinued in 2005. The HR-V is even further back in the memory: that went out of production in 2002.
“We have a three year plan which we can start to implement now that the new models are almost here,” he said. “I would like our brand to deliver 80,000 cars a year [in the UK] in 2-1/2 to three years’ time.”
Last year Honda sales in the UK amounted to 53,500. “We could have been doing more volume, but it wouldn’t have been profitable and it wouldn’t have been sustainable,” Brannan said. “It is not the primary objective.”
The three year plan includes the offer of five years’ servicing for a one off GBP500 payment with every model. Dealers will buy back any part of the package which is unused if the car is sold early or returned under a PCP deal after three years. It is taken up by 95% of customers on those cars where the offer is already in place. “Why wouldn’t they?” asked Brannan.
He also intends to build on Honda’s already industry leading customer satisfaction and loyalty record. “We have a fabulous dealer network. Loyalty is 61% and will become 85%.”
And he is hoping that nine successive years at the head of UK reliability surveys will become 10 in 2016. “Then we can really make something of it. It’s not an easy thing to make something of reliability, but a decade would be quite a story to tell.”
