The Honda press conference doesn't begin for another hour but we arrived twenty minutes ago to secure seats up front. Hopefully our view won't be blocked by people standing in front of us. For some reason, even though I'm operating on what seems like a total of about 10 hours of sleep since Saturday morning, my body clock hasn't permitted me to sleep past 4AM each morning that I've been here, so it feels good to sit and relax. It's a good thing that we showed up here when we did, because more and more people are beginning to stream in to Honda's press conference area. From the way the stage is arranged, it doesn't appear that Honda will have any surprises in the shape of supercar concepts or anything like that. The signage indicates that it's pretty much going to be about the blobular Puyo and the CR-Z. I would walk around and snap a few more shots of the Honda booth area but I can't risk losing our seating position. We got a spot that seems about optimal for CR-Z reveal - the prime seats in up front in the center were already taken by the time we got here though, so we may not get too many clean shots of the Puyo until the throngs subside. Interestingly it seems that they've caught on to the idea of "product reveals" and the whole dog and pony show that goes on at auto shows in the USA. The last few times I've been in Japan, many of the automakers had all of their concept cars on full display from the time the doors opened. We'll try to update this news item during the press conference if anything of interest comes up.

Hopefully later I will have time to finish up my report from yesterday, including our first track time in the JDM Civic Type R at Twin Ring Motegi's East Course. In short, the car is absolutely brilliant. The interesting news is that it seems like Honda may be open to persuasion in terms of getting the Civic Type R into the US. Soon, the TOV will organize a campaign to try to convince Honda to bring it over ASAP. High-level management types are here and have said that they would be interested in seeing how much serious interest there is for having the JDM Civic Type R on offer in the USA. We assured them that we could produce hundreds, if not thousands of voices in favor of such a move.









UPDATE: Things got pretty hectic following the press conference so we hightailed it out of the Honda booth and went around checking out some of the other stuff at the show. One of the key highlights of Mr. Fukui's speech was that it sounds like the CR-Z will make it to market. His words (at least the translated version we heard) were something like "Honda will bring the CR-Z to market as soon as possible". This is great news and we're hoping it will be offered in both hybrid and non-hybrid versions. There was no timeframe given for the expected introduction date.

Last edited by JeffX on October 24, 2007 05:36