Speaker 1: Honda’s debuting two new EV concepts here at CES 2024. Its new Honda zero series saloon and Space Hub. The former is a low slung sports sedan, and the latter is a taller, more comfortable van, and they both preview an upcoming zero series of next generation EVs that’ll follow the prologue launching this year. So the key things to know about the space hub are right there in the name. It’s the more spacious of the two with a more vertical upright van like design, and [00:00:30] it’s designed as a hub for passengers on the road. So you can see here in the back the seat space towards the middle so I can more easily engage with conversation with people who are back here with me. Now, on the outside, we have a new Brill design with an animated interior and illuminated exterior, and right there in the middle is a new Frameless H logo that Honda says it’ll be using in all of its next generation EVs to differentiate them from its gasoline cars. So now that we’ve had our veggies, let’s go have a little dessert with a saloon.
Speaker 1: [00:01:00] Now the saloon to my eye from certain angles looks like Honda asked itself What if we built a Lamborghini Tage, but it was also electric and kind of a shooting break. It’s got an interesting, very angular, low slung and wide stance here. Now up front we’ve got an animated grill similar to the one that we saw on the Space Hub, and that’s replicated out back with that sort of single failure taillight design. Now interestingly, this vehicle uses a gold wing door design. So you’ve [00:01:30] got one wing on each side that opens up giving you a wide opening given access to both the front and the rear seats. And those front seats, if you really pay attention to it, they’re positioned way back in the middle of the vehicle. There’s so much car ahead of the steering wheel, and I’m wondering what are they going to do with that?
Speaker 1: Is it storage space or what? Now Honda hasn’t spoken very much about performance of powertrain, but we do know that they are going to use an e axle design, which puts the electric motors in line with the front wheels so that you don’t have a lot of engine bay packaging to worry [00:02:00] about. And they’re also talking about next generation battery technology aimed at reducing degradation. They’re expecting less than 10% degradation over 10 years of operation, and the ability to charge from 10 to around 80% in around 10 to 15 minutes, that’s a big upgrade over what they’ve got in their vehicles. Now, the reason you should be most excited about the saloon here is that Honda’s announced that it will serve as the basis of a production card that should be arriving in 2026. We can only hope that it looks this bad ad. Be sure to stay tuned to cnet.com where you [00:02:30] can find all the rest of our coverage of CES 2024.
