It's Going To Take Forever For Dealers To Sell Remaining Honda CR-Zs

We’re as certain as can be that the Honda CR-Z is dead. Defunct. Discontinued. Done for. Any other applicable d word you can think of.

Not only was the CR-Z long since discontinued in Europe and Australia, Honda is now offering a Final Label edition of the CR-Z in Japan, the company’s home market and the location of CR-Z assembly. Moreover, American Honda’s PR department already indicated to TTAC that they thought everybody knew the CR-Z was deceased, down the drain, discarded.

Dead, yes. But not yet departed. Honda’s U.S. dealers have plenty of CR-Z inventory. Don’t all storm the gates at once now. Tamp down that excitement. Let’s all remain calm.

Automotive News says that on June 1, 2016, there were an estimated 2,000 two-seat, hybrid CR-Zs in Honda’s U.S. inventory. AutoTrader’s inventory shows nearly 1,400 new CR-Zs at U.S. dealers; Cars.com has more than 1,500.

For a vehicle nameplate such as the Honda Civic, that wouldn’t be enough cars to get dealers through three days. American Honda averages roughly 32,000 Civic sales per month.

On the other hand, American Honda hasn’t quite sold 33,000 CR-Zs since the model’s late-2010 inception. The lion’s share of those sales occurred by the end of 2011, after which sales plunged by nearly two-thirds in 2012. By 2015, U.S. sales of the CR-Z were 73 percent lower than they were in 2011.

Not that the CR-Z was a particularly successful car in 2011. While Honda reported more than 10,000 sales of the CR-Z in the model’s first month on sale in Japan – presumably the result of a build-up in demand – the CR-Z was averaging fewer than 1,000 U.S. sales per month by the time the Hyundai Veloster arrived near the end of the year. The more spacious four-seat Veloster, sans hybrid but not that much less efficient than the CR-Z, produced more than 2,800 monthly sales during its launch in the fourth-quarter of 2011. Nearly 140,000 Velosters have been sold in the U.S. since the Hyundai’s arrival.

If Honda was still selling the CR-Z in 2011-like numbers, you’d be hard pressed to find one on a dealer’s lot just a couple of months from now (assuming no further CR-Z imports). But the CR-Z’s U.S. decline was so rapid, and the drop-off in demand so severe, that dealers will be left searching for customers for many months.

With 2,000 units in stock, Honda stores have a seven-month supply. Over the first five months of 2016, American Honda reported fewer than 200 CR-Z sales per month, on average. February’s result, only 128 sold, was the model’s worst month ever, down 93 percent from the CR-Z’s 1,819-unit record in April 2011. March was the CR-Z’s second-worst month ever. Year-over-year, U.S. Honda CR-Z sales in 2016’s first five months are down 11 percent.

Historically speaking, Honda isn’t terribly keen on providing the incentives required to quickly clear out discontinued product. The first-generation Honda Ridgeline, for example, ended production at the midway point of 2014, but dealers were still clearing out the last few copies of that truck early this year. The Honda Insight’s formal obituary was written two years ago, but American Honda still reports a handful of Insight sales every month.

With that in mind, don’t expect to find a 2016 CR-Z collecting dust behind your local Honda dealer with balloons attached to its wing mirrors, a gorilla on the roof, and a 50% Off placard on its hood. Granted, the evidence suggests you still probably wouldn’t be all that interested anyway.

[Image: Honda]

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.