Temple of VTEC Rumors and News - Spied in LA: New J-model Honda Crossover

Honda Mobilio Spike

Honda Stepvan Concept

You've may have already seen these pics over on autoblog or perhaps elsewhere on the web. The story is that one of their readers spotted this from his/her apartment in downtown LA and grabbed these shots. From the images we have it appears a production company was shooting a television advertisement. It seems there's a lot of confusion surrounding the identity of the vehicle. Despite the fact that Autoblog themselves insisted it's NOT a Ford Fairlane (based upon first-hand knowledge), that doesn't seem to change the mindset of the majority of folks posting in their comments. It's NOT a Ford Fairlane. We have strong reason to believe that it's a new Japanese-model Honda crossover vehicle that's been rumored for quite a while. It's supposedly smaller than a CR-V, yet offers a 7-passenger seating configuration.

It wasn't too long after autoblog came here looking for the opinion of our readers that my inbox was fattened with a 10MB zip file and a sales pitch from our spypal, Brenda Priddy. The asking price for the pics was more than we thought they were worth so we made a counteroffer and came to an agreement and now we can show you 5 of the pics. As you can see, the pics are actually rather poor in quality - it appears that they were shot with some sort of "hi def" camcorder. I say "hi def" because whatever camera that was used clearly utilizes a lot of upsampling to achieve its "hi def" resolution.

Anyhow, I don't care what anybody else says - as I asserted in our forums last night and even over at Autoblog, I believe what you're looking at in these shots is the new crossover model that's rumored to be launched in Japan this spring. Yeah, so those speculative BestCar sketches were off by a fair bit, but after doing this thing for over 12 years and being a big Honda follower for much longer than that, I'm pretty sure I know a Honda when I see one, and this vehicle has more than enough traits to convince me that it is a Honda. And the only Honda that it lines up with seems to be this new crossover vehicle that is due soon. This is not a next-generation Honda Element or StepWGN. With all the obfuscated Japanese articles, this crossover model seems to be most frequently linked with the HR-V. For those who are doubting that this 3 bar grille has anything to do with Honda, it's actually one of the signatures of a number of trucky JDM Honda things like the Mobilio Spike and even the Stepvan Concept we saw last month. I've included a few pics as evidence.