Autocar - First for car news and reviews

The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it star of the Paris show was undoubtedly the Audi A4 Concept E. 

European government is well down the road on demanding that the average CO2 output of a car maker’s range is just 130g/km – with promise of further cuts to come. As a result, some people in the industry wondered whether the day of the large car was over, and whether we would all end up in diesel-powered Ford Focuses.

However, the EU hadn’t figured on the might of the German auto engineer.

It must be pretty galling for Honda that, despite being the first volume manufacturer to offer a hybrid car with the 1999 Insight, it's Toyota that has reaped the publicity benefit from selling this greener technology, not to mention substantial sales besides.

Honda's mistake was to sell the right hardware in the wrong package. The eccentric Insight two-seater appealed to relatively few, and the Civic hybrid looked far too similar to the standard car to score its owners nods of green approval from their peers.

Evidence that Honda has learned what Toyota discovered - that a hybrid is best sold with bespoke wrapping that announces to the rest of the world that this is a greener machine - has now appeared in the form of another car called Insight, though this time it's a five door, five seater, and with a design all its own.

The new Honda Insight looks like a regular hatchback. Which is exactly what it should resemble. After all, that’s the Toyota Prius’s greatest strength – it’s thoroughly conventional to drive but just that little bit odd-looking, so that the neighbours know that you’re also trying to save the planet.

And Toyota has sold more than a million of them, so it’s no wonder that Honda is aping the formula.

Just a thought, but what if today’s leading car-makers won’t be the leading car-makers in 20 years time?

Maybe, just maybe, electric cars are the car industry’s internet. Google was founded almost exactly a decade ago, and who’d really heard of it seven years ago?

Remember the stir Mazda caused when the Mazda 2 came on the scene?

Here was a good-to-drive supermini that was 100 kgs lighter than the car it replaced, turning the trend for cars getting ever bigger and heavier smartly on its head. For that, the 2 was a real breath of fresh air. Still is, come to that.

There’s a growing view that ill-judged taxes and charges introduced under a green banner are turning motorists against that basic idea. 

Even Greenpeace joined this chorus a while back, criticising proposed new VED taxes.

So what is the Environmental Transport Association up to?

A missive today from a business that makes money out of providing motorists with an ‘environmentally-friendly’ breakdown service has jumped on a bandwagon started up by a local government minister demanding higher parking charges in city centres.