Honda Remembered Something Everyone Else Forgot
The Super-N is cheap, retro, and has fake gear shifts — and somehow that's exactly the point.
Photo · InsideEVs - Articles
There's a version of the affordable EV that feels like a punishment. Bare interiors, anonymous styling, the vague sense that you're driving something designed by a committee that had already given up. Honda, apparently, was not in that meeting.
The Super-N arrives in Europe this year priced under $27,000 — under £20,000 in the UK, where it goes on sale this summer — and it does not feel like a compromise dressed up in a press release. It feels like someone at Honda asked a different question. Not how little can we spend? But what do people actually want to feel?
The Number That Changes the Conversation
That price point matters more than it looks. Not because cheap is good, but because cheap and considered is rare. The Super-N pairs its accessible entry price with a 199-mile range — a number that won't impress the spec-sheet crowd but will quietly handle the actual lives of most city drivers without drama or anxiety. That's the range where EVs stop being a conversation about infrastructure and start being a conversation about driving.
Motoring Research flagged it as a retro-styled city EV, and the styling is doing real work here. This isn't retro as a marketing shortcut — slap some round headlights on a generic hatchback and call it heritage. The Super-N reads as something that has a point of view, a machine that knows what it is and doesn't apologize for its scale.
The Gear Shift Is the Whole Argument
But here's the detail that stops you: simulated gear shifting. InsideEVs noted it, almost as a curiosity, but I keep coming back to it because it's the most honest thing Honda has done in this segment. Electric motors don't shift gears. Everyone knows this. Honda knows this. And yet they built in the sensation anyway — not to deceive, but to connect.
That's the meta-observation that both sources circle without quite landing on. The Super-N isn't trying to out-tech the competition. It's trying to out-feel it. The simulated shifts are an admission that driving has always been partly theater, partly ritual — and that stripping all of that out in the name of efficiency strips out the reason people fall in love with cars in the first place.
The affordable EV market spent years telling buyers to get over it. Get over the noise, the vibration, the tactile feedback, the sense of mechanical participation. Get over the idea that a car should feel like something. Honda just decided not to make that argument.
Nostalgia and accessibility have always been the same conversation — both are about lowering the barrier to feeling something real. The Super-N under £20,000 with fake gear shifts and 199 miles of range isn't a contradiction. It's a thesis.
The best cars have always known that the point was never the machine.
Keep reading cars.
Gernot Döllner Laughed. That's Worth More Than a Press Release.
Audi's CEO didn't kill the R8 or bury the V8 — he just made clear that survival now requires a reason.
Lotus Drilled a Hole in the Roof and Called It a Return to Form
The Emira 420 Sport isn't a faster car. It's a philosophical statement with a price tag.
Under £20,000, a Full PHEV. Europe's Small Cars Have Some Explaining to Do.
BYD just dropped a plug-in hybrid supermini into a segment that's been coasting on mild hybrids for years — and priced it like an insult.
From the other desks.
Audemars Piguet Handed AMBUSH the Keys. Watch What Happens Next.
When one of horology's most guarded houses invites a Tokyo fashion label into its most experimental line, the collaboration isn't the story — the admission is.
Brian Flores Gets His Day in Court. The NFL Spent Three Years Trying to Prevent That.
The Supreme Court just handed the league its most uncomfortable outcome: sunlight.
Apple Can't Fold a Phone Because Folding Isn't the Hard Part
The foldable iPhone's production trouble has nothing to do with hinges — and that's the more interesting problem.