#HondaMotorCo

Honda has begun teasing out the electric Prologue in earnest, with its latest offering being a sketch of what appears to be a lifted Civic. Though what we’re actually seeing is the brand’s newest “adventure-ready” SUV tapping into the same inoffensive design language that now graces the ever-popular sedan.

The styling is neutral, perhaps even a little dull. But it’s unlikely to put anybody in a bad mood and is still rounded off in all the places one would expect from an EV. The Prologue looks as though it could come from Lucid, just with a dash of rugged design from Rivian and underpinned by Honda’s current design language. There’s little to gripe about, though there’s also not much to ogle.

Ahead of Honda’s planned EVs offensive for the United States, the automaker has announced a deluge of hybrid variants of existing products. However these new vehicles will come at the expense of the Insight, which the company had just confirmed will be discontinued after 2022. In its stead will be new hybrid trips for the CR-V, Accord, and Civic — the latter of which served as the template for the passing model.

Honda has filed to trademark ADX with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), presumably so it can use the name for an upcoming luxury model. While Honda has previously sold vehicles with alphanumeric monikers ending in the letter X, that’s literally Acura’s entire lineup and it’s supposed to be delivering a few new models to round out its rather limited selection.

Honda is recalling nearly 789,000 vehicles over a defect that could cause the hood to fly up while driving. While anyone wanting to reenact their favorite scene from 1995’s Tommy Boy is going to be thrilled, those less eager to follow Chris Farley into an early grave will probably want to get their car repaired ahead of any hilarious mishaps.

A report filed by the manufacturer with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) listed the affected models. They include the 2019 Honda Passport, 2016-2019 Honda Pilot, and 2017-2020 Honda Ridgeline. This impacts 788,931 vehicles globally, with the vast majority (725,000) being located in the United States.

If you were hoping the returning Acura Integra would be the peppy, three-door liftback everyone coveted 20 years ago, we may have some bad news for you. Based on the latest teasers coming from the Honda Motor Company, the fifth-generation model will likely harken back to the five-door vehicles that rarely saw themselves equipped with aftermarket body kits or cold-air intakes and barely received any screen time in the Fast & Furious films.

Rather than focus on the cars of the 1990s ( arguably the high-water mark for the Integra), Honda has decided to base the new model on the first-generation and even included a photo of the 1986 Acura Integra RS 5-Door in the latest marketing materials to drive the point home.

Honda Motor Co. will be accompanying Fiat Chrysler Automobiles in pooling its emissions with electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla in an attempt to adhere to CO2 limits mandated by the European Union. For 2020, the average emissions of all vehicles sold within the region must not exceed 95 grams of CO2 per kilometer. Companies failing to comply will be forced to pay the government sizable fines as it readies even higher targets for next year.

Over half of automakers planning to move product inside Europe next year are already assumed to fail however, resulting in a series of rushed hybrid/EV products, the obliteration of the diesel-powered passenger vehicles, and companies desperate to team up with the manufacturers that came in under the regulatory limits.

On Saturday, Honda Motor Co. confirmed another death linked to faulty Takata airbag inflation units. While this is the seventeenth known fatality within the United States related to the defect, at least 26 deaths have been tabulated globally with nearly 300 injuries on the books since 2009. But it’s assumed the actual numbers are quite a bit larger since the affected vehicles go back much further than that.

The most recent incident involved a 2002 model year Honda Civic that crashed on August 20th in Mesa, Arizona. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Honda jointly confirmed the airbag inflator as the culprit. Unfavorable conditions had led to the defective part rupturing during an accident after the propellant had broken down, causing the system to spray shrapnel inside the cabin just inches from the driver’s chest.

Honda Motor Co. has agreed to pay $84.2 million to settle an investigation conducted by American states regarding its use of the famously defective Takata airbags — units linked to numerous deaths and hundreds of injuries.

Honda recalled about 12.9 million vehicles (some of them Acura models) equipped with inflation devices that ran the risk of accumulating moisture to the point where the propellant inside could destabilize, leading to an overly forceful explosion during an impact. Upon rupturing, these units could effectively spray shrapnel into the cabin area.

While Honda’s first major recalls were enacted in 2008, by 2013 millions of vehicles were in the process of being retracted by rival manufacturers that also used Takata as a supplier. And it just kept getting bigger until it was the largest recall in history, with Honda receiving the most ire due to the high number of fatalities suffered within its vehicles — and for having prior knowledge of the defects.

Struck by a cyber attack on its global computer network that temporarily knocked out a few factories and most of its customer service centers, Honda is reporting that things are gradually returning to normal.

“Work is being undertaken to minimize the impact and to restore full functionality of production, sales and development activities,” the company said in a statement earlier this week.

Impacted facilities are supposedly already in decent shape, and the business hopes to move past this in short order. But what actually happened?

The Justice Department has opened an antitrust probe into four automakers that formed a pact with California to compromise on tailpipe emissions, effectively circumventing federal regulators, last July.

Over the summer, Ford Motor Co., Honda Motor Co., BMW AG and Volkswagen Group announced a joint agreement with the California Air Resources Board to adhere to fueling standards slightly lower than Obama-era rules but still significantly higher than the Trump administration’s proposal from 2018. The Justice Department is seeking to determine whether or not that qualifies as a violation of federal competition laws.

Despite the growing importance of crossover vehicles, Acura is one of the few automakers that has not abandoned its commitment to sedans. It intends to prove that by bringing a production-ready vehicle, based heavily on the 2016 Precision Concept (seen above), to Pebble Beach this summer.

The car will also signal Acura’s entry into a new era of styling, underpinned by muscular shapes offset with inorganic angles — sort of like a sexy robot. If you want sense of what that looks like, and are made uncomfortable by the notion of having to Google the words “sexy robot,” contrast the 2018 RDX with the 2019 model to get a taste of Acura’s updated design language.

Honda Motor Co. is planning to install another round of replacement airbag inflators that have been improperly installed under an earlier recall. Unsurprisingly, these are Takata units and represent an expansion of an earlier recall from September that had also been incorrectly fixed. In both cases, the issue only affects passenger-side airbags.

The previous recall dealt with the 2008-2012 Accord, 2010-2012 Crosstour, 2006-2011 Civic, 2007-2011 CR-V, 2009-2012 Fit, 2010-2012 Insight, and 2009-2012 Pilot. The new fix will add another model to that list.

Exchange rates seriously hurt Japanese manufacturers over the past year as the yen bobbed and weaved following 2015’s surge. However, Honda was not among them. The final quarter of 2016 saw the automaker posting a 27 percent earnings increase, despite being hammered by the same foreign exchange losses as the rest of its Pacific brethren.

The first quarter of 2017 appears to have shaped up much the same way, only with slimmer margins — exactly as Honda predicted. Knowing that the North American market was about to take a turn for the worse, company analysts clung to the hope that more favorable currency rates and higher-than-expected sales in Asia would keep operating profits out of the red. Earnings ultimately creeping ahead by 0.9 percent to 269.21 billion yen ($2.40 billion) for Q1 — no thanks to the United States.

The current-generation Honda’s Fit is considerably less adorable than previous incarnations, but still a vehicle that’s easy to recommend to those with a specific price point and varied needs — especially if they also do all their driving in the city. However, it wasn’t perfect and rationalizing its purchase became difficult as upmarket models offered more car for less money.

For 2018, Honda has updated the subcompact Fit with driver-assist features, new looks, and some mild performance accoutrements for a not-unreasonable amount of cash. It doesn’t necessarily make it a better buy than the Civic you’ve been considering, but it should be enough to make the Fit deserving of a second look.

After a brief history lesson underscoring just how important the Accord has been to North America throughout the last four decades, Honda unveiled the 10th generation of its midsize sedan to a semi-enthusiastic audience in Detroit today.

To be fair, it’s not the most exciting segment occupying the automotive landscape, but it is one of the most important — despite losing significant ground to crossovers and SUVs over the last few years. Honda clearly doesn’t want the Accord relegated exclusively to unimaginative buyers needing nothing more than basic transportation and fleet sales.

Despite sinking sales, automakers aren’t giving up on the midsize sedan, and Honda has placed some genuine effort behind the new Accord. That doesn’t mean they’ve converted it into a heart-stopping thrill ride, nor should they, since that’s not the kind of car it’s supposed to be. But they’ve taken steps to ensure the vehicle has improved in meaningful ways. While that didn’t stop Jeff Conrad, senior vice president of American Honda, from claiming it was “unquestionably the most dramatic remake of the Accord that we’ve ever done” at the unveiling, there is truth in that statement.

However, some the biggest changes coming to the 2018 Accord are what you won’t find in the upgraded model.