Honda Accord Euro 2010 News

The last call is about to go out for Honda Accord Euro orders. The car has just been killed off, despite its popularity here.The Accord Euro succumbed because of global demand for the wide-body Accord that's more like a Toyota Camry and a winner in the US heartland.Nearly 75,000 Accord Euros have been delivered in Australia over the past 12 years, a result that handily trumps the sibling locally. Fans expected its popularity would mean a new-generation car in 2015 but it's not enough to save the car.The bad news has just arrived from Japan after a worldwide tally of the third-generation Accord Euro.Honda Australia director Stephen Collins says: "It was a global decision to discontinue the model. The car is not sold in the US, not sold in Japan. The lead market was Europe but sales have been declining there." "There is no doubt it's been a success for us. For three years in a row we sold more than 10,000. We were a reasonable market, but not big enough. We're disappointed, obviously. But the global decision was based on the decline in Europe." Honda Australia has locked its final production slot for the start of next year, which means its dealers are taking orders for cars that will be delivered until the middle of 2015.The Euro arrived in 2003 as part of a new wave of Japanese cars, including the Subaru Liberty, which were much more European in the way they looked and drove.The idea was to launch a full-scale attack in the soft underbelly of European prestige brands including Audi and BMW, but the global financial crisis hit and the Japanese makers retreated, and now the Europeans have their own generation of price-competitive compacts."We introduced it in 2003. During the same period we've sold 52,000 wide-body Accords. The best year was 2005, when we sold 10,500 cars," Collins says. He is not expecting a surge in the car's final months, says there no special run-out edition plan, and expects the price to stay at $30,340.The loss of the Euro is another blow for Honda Australia, whose sales have been in retreat this year. "We re going to end up around 33,000 this year. That's clearly down on last year but we're having a much stronger second half to the year," Collins says."Next year, we're hoping for close to 40,000. That will be led by HR-V and we want to be one of the main players in that small SUV segment."

He is - or was - Hirotaka Ono - a visionary who re-invented the Japanese brand and changed everything, from boosting the quality of its cars to creating the can-do attitude among senior managers that's essential for the success of any car company. Ono had a giant advantage because he was married to the daughter of company founder, Osama Suzuki.He was able to use his family connection to ramrod a range of changes which would have been impossible for anyone else, especially a 40-something revolutionary in a country which usually puts age and experience ahead of youth and enthusiasm. Even so, he still had to walk the walk on everything from design and driving enjoyment to bottom-line financial deals.The award winning Suzuki Swift is an Ono car, so too is the current Grand Vitara, as well as the Kizashi. His track record also includes the less-successful second-generation XL7, thankfully only sold in the USA, but everyone makes an occasional mistake. Ono died too early at the end of 2007, but not before he inspired the cars coming through Suzuki today and forecast the global financial crisis - as well as planning the way his company would react to the challenge."Thanks to Mr Ono we have learned what we can do. He inspired us," says Tak Hayasaki, managing director of Suzuki Australia. Hayasaki has his own challenges in trying to lift Suzuki's share of Australia's annual car sales from its current 2.4 per cent to around six per cent, but he knows he has the strongest lineup in the company's history.The Alto is too small for a lot of people, but a $12,990 driveway bottom line makes plenty of sense with six airbags, ABS and ESP, as well as alloy wheels. The Swift is getting very old but is still a good car, the Grand Vitara is a safe choice and the SX4 does a good enough job.Kizashi is the game-changer for Suzuki, the same as the first Mazda6 and Accord Euro were for Mazda and Honda, combining Euro-type driving enjoyment with Japanese quality.This week the company is adding an all-wheel drive car to the Kizashi line, the Sports, and believes it can boost its sales by 100 cars a month. That's 50 per cent of the current volume. It's a big call for a car which already goes head-to-head with Mazda6 and Euro and now faces up to the might of the Subaru Liberty, the car that convinced Australians about all-wheel drive.As he looks forward, with a new Swift before the end of the year - not   that you would pick it as all-new from pictures - Hayasaki knows where the credit goes. "I have to thankyou to Mr Ono for what he has given us. He proved that we can do it."

After leading the world on so many fronts - from quality to comfort and reliability - they have been hit badly by the global financial crisis.  Toyota and Honda and many of the others wound back dramatically at the onset of the GFC, not just on their production lines but also in their motorsport programs - F1 was the first casualty - and new-product development.We are now seeing the results in Australian showrooms, where the Corolla and Civic are now mid-pack in the small-car class and former pacesetters including the Mazda6, Honda Accord Euro and even the locally-made Camry are struggling against newer and better rivals.  They are fine for everyday transport, but not as impressive as they were just five years ago.Subaru has also cut costs and its latest styling work - particularly on the Liberty and Outback - reflects a desperate desire to win sales in the USA.  Contrast all of them against the Suzuki Kizashi, which comes from one of the few Japanese brands that held its nerve through the GFT. Suzuki has cut its production targets, and admits that extra Kizashi models are on the back-burner, but is going to do brilliantly well with the car.Toyota and Honda, in contrast, are relying on value-added deals to keep customers coming in Australia. They are recovering from the economic downturn but nowhere near as rapidly as some of their rivals  - particularly Hyundai.In Australia, many of our Japanese cars are now also actually built in Thailand. It's not a major drama, because the quality is much the same, but it shows how the battle to cut costs is influencing the Japanese makers. The Thai drive also shows that Japan Incorporated is now happy to produce bland transport modules instead of appealing cars, going for numbers first - in showrooms and on the balance sheet. It's a reasonable response to the GFC but is going to cause problems in coming years.Why? Because Australia is seeing so many classy European cars at more affordable prices - look at the Volkswagen Polo - and because Korean is coming up fast.  Hyundai is now doing a better job than Toyota at building Toyota-style cars, with adventurous styling, classy quality and great prices. It's latest, the i45 replacement for the dowdy Sonata, is really good on every front except its awful steering and lacklustre front suspension.The i45 is a Camry done better and, like the Kizashi, one of the stars of 2010. And it's not the end for Hyundai, which has all sorts of new models coming from the baby i20 to an overdue sporty car sometime in 2012.And that's whan the Japanese really could be in trouble. It's not because Hyundai has something new but because the Japanese wound their development programs back during the GFT and the results of that conservative risk management will not really be known until we see - or don't see - the work which should have been done over the past two years.Follow Paul Gover on Twitter!

Mazda was the first to move, cutting prices by $930 to $2000 in October, and now Honda has joined the push with savings of $1500 to $3000.  Cars to take a cut include the go-fast Civic Type R, Accord Euro and Odyssey.The bad news for Honda buyers is that models built in Thailand - the CR-V, Accord, Civic and Jazz - hold the price line because of a free- trade agreement.  Even so, Honda has found space to trim the sticker of the Thai-built City four-door, which now has a starting price of $19,490.The new Honda pricelist comes into effect on today.