It's Time to Bring Tiny Evs Like the Honda N-One E to the Us
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
thedrive.comTechstory
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Electric VehiclesAutomotive InnovationSustainability
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Electric Vehicles
Automotive Innovation
Sustainability
The article suggests that the US should adopt tiny EVs like the Honda N-One E, sparking a discussion on the feasibility and potential benefits of such vehicles in the US market.
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Sep 30, 2025 at 9:19 PM EDT
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Smaller vehicles need smaller batteries, smaller motors, less energy to move, and put less wear and tear on public infrastructure. If the interiors are nice, I think there would be a market for them. Perhaps government policy could encourage efficient use of valuable resources too.
If most consumers can afford a large car, they ended up buying a larger car.
The overlap of high income earners and those cars was not significant from a PMF standpoint.
CUVs and Hatchbacks seem to be the best middle ground for both types of consumers.
Now maybe I live in an unusual area but all the time I have people park a Honda Fit that looks just like mine at a car parking lot. When my last Fit got totalled I found that (1) they didn't have any new Fits, (2) they had one used Fit that they had just bought that morning, and (3) they had a neat row of 50 or so HR-Vs that nobody wanted to buy.
If you actually go to a car dealer looking for a size L car they will try to sell you an XXL car, if you go looking for an M car they try to sell you an XL, if you go looking for an S they will try to sell you an L. They have a lot of tricks they play to do this, not least a manipulation of the narrative, the threat of pulling away access to review vehicles from car publications that question their narrative, etc. Sure a lot of people are scared by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, other people really like a big car or would rather roll their car or crash through the guardrail than break their ankle in a crash. But no matter how big of a car you want, they want you to buy a bigger one.
Yet the data just doesn't justify the narrative that "small cars" have a PMF in the US and Canada.
I get that you and a subset of people really like small cars, but you cannot justify funding low uptake SKUs just because some people like something.
> they didn't have any new Fits
Because the Fit was discontinued in 2020 because most Americans and Canadians just weren't buying it.
My dad had the exact same thing happen to him at American car dealers in the 1970s -- supposedly they had small cars for sale but actually they didn't. Today it is Japanese car dealers doing the same thing.
Before the pandemic (discounts disappeared) I used to see big-ass trucks with decals advertising $7000 off. If people really wanted those cars they wouldn't have to discount them to sell them, instead you'd see $7000 discounts on the small cars that supposedly people don't want to buy.
Using a single regional data point does not provide proof that there is a financial reason to start building Honda Fits again.
And before the pandemic, the HRV began outselling the Honda Fit in the US by 2016 [0]
[0] - https://www.honda.com/-/media/Honda-Homepage/PDF/DFB_2024_US...
That data is all bogus anyway, it reflects the cars that get made, not the cars that people want to buy because the cars that nobody wants to buy get bought by Hertz ina form of ‘demand laundering’. Of course it means you have a bd experience and think I’ll never by an American car though the reality is that I probably won’t buy another Honda because they canceled the fit although they have no data at all that can prove that. Just data that the dealer but 100 HR-Vs which are smaller in the inside and now it is the dealer’s problem.
> I probably won’t buy another Honda
I mean that is your perogative. You can find another brand that better aligns with your needs. I think Nissan has come to own that market, and their American cars are fairly reliable now.
> answer to that even if people like bigger cars. One of the biggest successes now is the Ford Maverick
Yep. But it's not a subcompact hatchback like the Honda Fit. Which is what I am getting at - the subcompact hatchback just doesn't have significant PMF in the US by the 2020s.
Small cars are an opportunity, but it will primarily be CUVs and compact pickups.
If that's not small enough there are city cars like Citroen Ami and others but those are more glorified golf carts with very limited range.