At Showrooms, No Honda Insights in Sight

The two-seat Honda Insight hybrid car officially went on sale Dec. 15, but shoppers trying to find one at a Southern California Honda showroom will have about as much luck as a Yeti hunter in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not that the Insight, with its dual gasoline and electric motors and 70-mile-per-gallon fuel rating, doesn’t exist. It’s just that every one that Honda Motor Co. has shipped to the U.S. from the factory in Japan has been sold on an advance order and was delivered to the buyer without passing through the showroom. To date, Honda has delivered 68 Insights in the U.S. At peak production later this year, the No. 3 Japanese auto maker expects to build about 300 hybrids a month for the U.S. market. But it could be late spring before deliveries start outstripping advance sales, Torrance-based American Honda Motor Co. said. “We had hoped to have some [unsold Insights] in the dealerships by March, but people keep coming in and ordering them,” spokesman Art Garner said. So far, he said, dealers have taken advance orders for 200 Insights.