The CRX Successor is Dead

There are times in history when the second coming of an item doesn’t come anywhere near the following or enjoyment had by the original. Most of the time we can look to movies for these comparisons such as Back to the Future, Start Trek, Men in Black and others where the second movie wasn’t anywhere near as good as the first, although there are definitely some worse examples. In many of these instances a third movie was needed to redeem the franchise and make things right again with us, the discerning public.

When an automaker attempts to make a new version of something old, but adds a different name to it the vehicle is generally a huge hit or doomed to failure. The Honda CRX was a car that we loved for many years. It was simple, easy to drive, affordable and sporty. This car attracted teenagers like flies to honey in its heyday and has been a favorite of tuners because it already comes equipped with many of the items they want to begin with. After years of success Honda decided it no longer would make this car and the CRX was left to the imagination and those who still had them felt fortunate.

In 2010 Honda tried for a small sporty car with a high back and only two seats once again. this car was designated as the CR-Z and was built as a hybrid. Since hybrid powertrains were on the rise at the time this looked like a fitting solution and the CR-Z was affordable and sporty to look at, but it lacked something we all wanted more than anything else; excitement under the engine.

By the time the CR-Z came to be we were already seeing some sports car use hybrid powertrains to increase the power output of vehicles. Now, only six years later we see several high end luxury sports cars that have small engines but massive horsepower and torque numbers because of the advancements made in the hybrid powertrains. This was certainly something the CR-Z needed to get the job done right, but it didn’t offer us much at all.

The CR-Z came to us with an engine that made 130 horsepower and either 127 or 140 lb.-ft. of torque depending upon if the car used the CVT or the six-speed manual transmission. Having a CVT for a car that’s supposed to be a sports car was another problem as these transmissions haven’t been known to work well in sports cars. With this low power number we should have at least gotten great fuel mileage right? Wrong, the CR-Z of 2016 will provide you with 36 city/39 hwy mpg for the CVT and 34 city/38 hwy mpg with the manual while the Honda Fit is able to achieve 33 city/41 hwy mpg and it has a backseat for you to make use of.

Honda did turn to their performance arm, Honda Performance Development (HPD) in order to have more power pulled out of the engine. HPD was able to come up with a supercharging kit that would increase the output to 197 horsepower and 176 lb.-ft. of torque, but that was limited to those vehicles that had the manual transmission only.

As for sales, the CR-Z sold 5,249 units in 2010, increased to 11,330 in 2011, and then dropped by 2012 when only 4,192 were sold. The car improved slightly again in 2013with sales of 4,550 but then only sold 3,500 units in 2014 and 3,073 in 2015. As of the May reporting this car has only sold 970 so far this year which is a huge drop compared to the number from last year and was the final straw for Honda which has now pronounced the car dead.

There will be a funeral for this car in the form of the CR-Z Alpha Final Label which will be celebrated in the Japanese market to say goodbye to the car that was supposed to be the successor to the CRX but was never quite up to the task. This is an example of a car company building something that fit in between other cars in a niche that we didn’t even know existed and still don’t considering there were no direct competitors for the CR-Z and we now see it being shuffled off to that great junkyard in the sky.