This vehicle gets at least 50 mpg, is available with an intercooled turbo and AWD! Cost in Japan is about $16K US. I can't imagine a more perfect family vehicle in the age of dollar-a-liter fuel.

Honda｜バモス｜バーチャルショールーム

dunno why the URL comes up looking like this, but when I tested it, it loaded. Needs flash, I think.

warning to dial-up people: this site is video-intense.

The site's in Japanese, but the characters down the right hand side let you choose from several more videos. Other good search terms are "Vamos" and "Hobio"



Please, please, Honda LET US HAVE THESE!

 

meed-o-sheepo.....lol!!!! things pretty kool looking, but not for a daily....maybe for a shop van.

 

I cant read japanese, but from the pics, it looks like a 3 cylinder turbo engine???

 

an amazing econo box..

 

Wow. I don't even know what to say. Very different. Personally I wouldn't be caught dead in it but, to each is own. Looks like if you took it out on the highway on a windy day it would just tip over. I thought the Xb looked like a box. This thing definetly looks like a box. No areodynamics what so ever. Can't even compare it to a fit. Maybe you could compare it to the box that my big screen TV came in! LOL! Looks like it was made by little tike's or fisher price my first car!

 

haha slap some 20's and a wide body kit and i would pimp the hell out of it!

 

Don't get your hopes up, these are never coming to the US. It's a Kei Car -- an ultra light, ultra compact, super economical vehicle built for in-town use mainly. You better have a small family because it's about as big as a Fit, and maybe not even at that, and a bit narrower as well. People buy them because they're cheap to fuel and insure, and they're generally fairly funky. I've seen these all over when I was in Japan -- personal vehicles, delivery vehicles, etc. While they're reasonably safe to use in Japan, you'd be at serious risk here w/ all the highways and large vehicles that make up US traffic. If you think the Fit is underpowered w/ 109hp, try 64 for one of these and see how you like getting on the highway at rush hour.



Still, you can customize them to be pretty damn cool I think.

 

now if it were a plug-in hybrid - that would be even better (and the small size would work as a urban multi-purpose vehicle, even in the USA.)
I like!

 

Hey CHikubi, you seem to know a lot about Japan. I read a while back that it is very expensive to drive and maintain a vehicle. I read that parking spaces are charged by the cubic centimeter of space a car takes up, so having a very small car is better so you don't pay as much for parking. That, emissions and taxes. Is that true?

 

Oh my.... how I want one so very badly!

If it could do 100kph, I'd still buy it. Though all those damn SUVs out there would make me nervous. :/

Digi

 

Yeah, it's expensive. In our case, the car was always parked at the wife's folks' house, so not sure the going rate for a spot. In Sapporo, it's a lot more open than other cities, so the parking wasn't too bad or expensive overall I'd say compared to Osaka, Tokyo, etc. Still, you've got taxes when it's purchased, yearly taxes, inspection every few years (expensive), and gas which is like ~$4 gal to deal with, in addition to the various tolls, etc. for all the highways you might use. One thing that is very different than here is the width of the streets in some cities. Where I lived in Osaka, our street was so narrow you couldn't have two cars pass at the same time -- one had to back up to an intersection and let the other pass. Some streets you couldn't even get one full size car into, which is also where Kei cars really shined. I've also seen some amazing parking jobs in Japan, stuff that'd make your hair stand on end if you watched it.

 

The two biggest reasons that these Kei cars sell so well in Japan are taxes and insurance. Because the Kei car gets a special tax break that regular cars don't, and the difference is not negligible, the Japanese people can't resist.

Perhaps one more reason that the Japanese go for these Kei cars is that they, or at least some of them, are really spacious inside. Take the Wagon R (Suzuki) or Tanto (Daihatsu). You'd be shocked by how big inside. The Tanto is a rolling gymnasium.

But the thing about the K cars is that they are not cheap. In some cases, a car like the Vamos shown above can be more expensive to buy than a Fit or Yaris (Vitz). And while the advertised gas mileage sounds good, a lot of them get a surprisingly crappy mileage in real driving because you end up revving the engine really high to get them to go.

 

Americans are in for some real eye opening experiences in the next few years. For too long we have wasted so much and its coming home to haunt us. Our fuel mileage standards are a joke in todays world. We use twice the average energy than people in Europe and our tastes in cars is just terrible.

US cars get worse mileage now than they did in 1988. We have gone backwards while the rest of the world has moved on to more affordable and practical vehicles that use less fuel.

We love our Fit, as do most people who see it. I like the JDM vehicles and wish we could get more of them here. Americans are throwing away their energy future by driving monster SUVs that use fuel at an alarming rate.

Bring on the 40-50 MPG cars. If only people would wake up and see the writing on the walls. The days of monster 8-12 MPG SUVs has passed.

I love my Fit and would like to see more JDM models make it over here.

Hans