Anyone?
April 11, 2026
Alex KiersteinThe Honda N Super-One EV is just about everything I want in an electric Honda. Could it have built an EV identity here around something similar?
Honda just announced UK pricing for the widebody version of its N-One EV, and—somehow—it seems entirely reasonable. The MSRP is right around the equivalent of $26,000. Which is maddening, because it’d be easier to ignore it if it carried a price tag that its very small size and modest range couldn’t justify. If its price reflected Honda’s confused and frustrating EV strategy, which is now a non-strategy. This puglike, adorable, fun-looking little hatch could be a mascot of sorts of a different sort of EV strategy. Less moonshot, more of what Honda built its reputation and identity on.
And that was affordable cars and motorcycles. Reliable, often clever, usually innovative or mechanically interesting. But also, somehow cheerful. I’m thinking about the first- and second-generation Honda Civics. They didn’t have the ultra-clean Giugiaro lines of the contemporary Golf, but they did have a friendly image, a usable and relatively airy interior (a very low dash helped with that), and performance potential. People were swapping in Accord motors in the early 1980s. I think of it a bit like the versatility and appeal of the Issigonis Mini; economy, performance potential, and utility in a small package. Not as small as the Mini, but small by American standards.
Honda never sold the City hatchback here, but the turbo versions with their box flares and adorable face, with those big round headlights, is overtly referenced by the N-One. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. The City referenced the much older N360/N600; the N-One references both. That’s good. It’s less retro, more fundamental Honda aesthetics.
With everything, including the Honda Civic, adopting either divorced and semi-hidden headlight lamps or aggressive, angular housings, the N-One resonates with me. Not merely because it combines a lot of core, foundational Honda aesthetics and sensibilities, but because it’s refreshingly different. It’s aggressive, but in a fun way. Aggressively fun. Playful. A companion who’ll make the commute a little better. A vibe that the current iteration of BMW’s Mini brand seems to be slowly losing.
It could be qthe underpinnings of an identity. And it strikes me as odd that the N-One seems to sit apart from Honda’s vision of what its EV line would look like. Make a plus-sized version of the N Super-One, give it some vintage Honda Z600 flavor without being purely retro, position it as a value-oriented fun commuter with a much better resale and reliability proposition than a Mini. Price it as aggressively as it does the N Super-One in the UK. Build a lineup around it, lean into the kawaii aspect. You’ve got 30- and 40-somethings who grew up with heavy access to Japanese culture, especially in the urban areas in which a small EV sub-brand might play.
I don’t know if it makes business sense, but it feels like it could.
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