The CarGurus Blog

Many tears have been shed for the Honda S2000 (left), which will be discontinued after this model year. It’s a great sports car that had a wide appeal: 65,000 sold in the U.S., and over 110,000 worldwide.

Now the Japanese car magazine Best Car has run a story that’s been reiterated and replicated around the globe about an S2000 successor.

The car may look something like the ugly duckling below. And it may (we hope) not.

The revived S2000 is to be a 2+2 coupe with AWD. Apparently, it will use hybrid power, as found on the new Insight or the Civic IMA. The powerplant will be a V6 or a high-revving four-cylinder, perhaps like that in the S2000. There’s a lot of talk but little hard data yet.

So it’s kind of fun to speculate as to what will emerge from Honda’s labs. We do know that the company has canceled the V10-powered NSX, at least for now, but it is going to produce the CR-ZX (left), a cool-looking sporty hybrid, á la the Insight, with a direct-injection 2.5-liter engine. This car is scheduled for 2010 production.

I must say the idea of a hybrid AWD with V6 power sounds kind of weird. But we know Honda has done weird things before and made them pay off.

Batteries and AWD mean more weight and more complexity, the antithesis of the spartan approach Honda took with the S2000. Do you think that will work?

—jgoods

Car Industry News, Car Minded, Foreign Cars, General Chat, Hybrid Cars