HONDA SUPER-N

Kei car-based cutie escapes from Japan as Honda's latest EV venture

- ILLYA VERPRAET

The Honda Super-N is a small car.

That's a rarity, because most of today's 'small cars' are deceptively big, particularly if they have a battery: put a Renault 5 next to a 20-year-old supermini and it looks like an SUV. The Super-N is genuinely small, at 3599mm long and 1573mm wide without the mirrors (Renault 5: 3922mm and 1774mm). The Super N's smallness defines it - and mostly in good ways.

Derived from a Japanese kei car called the N-One e, the Super-N is in effect the hot hatch version that has been made suitable for worldwide tastes, rather than the weird and wonderful closed biotope that is the Japanese market. It's also a toe in the water for Honda and how it can approach EVs here. Clearly, Honda should have much more than a toe in the water by now, but we'll dwell on that some other time.

Instead of trying its luck with yet another medium-sized, medium-priced electric crossover, Honda is rekindling the joy of miniature driver's cars like the Renault Twingo RS and Volkswagen Up GTI.