Spotted at this year’s Tokyo Motor Show, the Honda S660 concept car is everything you might expect of the Japanese manufacturer. With a heritage in sports and performance engineering as well as producing safe and reliable run-arounds for the second family car market, Honda also produce some distinctively Asian design concepts, like the NSX-R GT. The mid-engined two seater S660 is compact and harks back to another conceptual idea that Honda pioneered – the small sports car. Think back to similarly sized and similarly named S360, which was unveiled at Tokyo as far back as 1962. Honda is clearly trying to remind us of their heritage with the new model.
However, unlike the earlier incarnation the newly engineered S660 is going to be developed into a production model. Some observers have already named the S660 as the spiritual successor to another Honda classic – the 1990s Beat. The open-topped sports car is to be fitted with a turbocharged three cylinder engine which will produce 64 horse power at peak output. Compare that with 154 bhp which the 2-litre petrol Honda Accord produces, their ever popular saloon. However, the additional speed and manoeuvrability is all down to the S660’s incredibly lightweight construction which is expected to come in at just about 900 kilos with the production version, due in 2015.
Whether the S660 will be launched into markets outside of Japan remains unknown. Designed to the Kei car concept, something that Honda pioneered, it would need crash testing to Euro NCAP standards before it could be sold into the European market. Having said that, Honda has not ruled out the possibility.