Testing the Insight’s hybrid promise
It is no secret that whenever the media gets together for a test drive outing, they also tend to drive hard and fast. The official reasoning for this is that if you don’t push the car hard enough, you won’t know what it’s made of. Most of the time, that approach works, but when Honda recently invited us for a media drive for the Insight, we got a little worried.
As we all know, the Insight is a car that sells on its green credentials. It is an eco car, with eco tyres, and a powertrain aimed to give you more in terms of kilometres per litre rather than kilometres per hour. A blast through our trunk roads at breakneck pace is not what it needs to show us its virtues.
To curb the media’s heavy-footedness in this drive, the organizers incorporated a fuel efficiency contest into the drive agenda. There were five test cars, with over twenty journalists present. Journalists were split into two groups and assigned three to a car. The first group drove in the morning from Klang Valley to Port Dickson, before handing the keys over to the second group, who took the Insights to Malacca.
We sent both YS and KON to attend the drive, and they were both assigned to different cars. The morning and afternoon groups competed separately. YS and his drive partners topped the morning group with a consumption reading of 24.4 km/l read from their trip computer. KON found himself in the afternoon group. His reading of 23.1 km/l saw him finish second behind the afternoon group-winning team which clocked an astonishing 25.8 km/l.
The introduction of this little contest meant that, for a change, none of us were in any danger of being stopped for speeding. Nevertheless, you would be surprised to know that even with our ‘eco’ mode of driving, there were cars out there, a souped up Proton Gen.2 amongst them, that were driving even slower than us.
As we sought to use as little an amount of fuel as possible, readouts from the Insight’s Eco Assist system proved useful in helping us to monitor our driving style. The slightest shade of blue in the speedometer back-lighting immediately saw us backing off the throttle.
Our focus in getting the best possible consumption figures meant that performance traits that we usually examine in a test car such as handling, braking and responsiveness had to take a back seat this time.
