Wednesday, October 15, 2008

New Honda Odyssey to debut 16th October



Following our previous first reports on the new Honda Odyssey and a slew of new technologies that will come with it, here we have exclusive images of the new Honda Odyssey that's set to debut on the 16th of October (15th for you, Americans).

What we can see here is that the team takes a very careful approach towards the new JDM Odyssey (What you have in America is actually just some ugly bloated people carrier). Staying along with the excellent low slung approach, the new Odyssey will still be based on the Accord, hence believably so, it'll provide much more interior room compared to the current, already very spacious Odyssey. Using the same chrome plated horizontal grill design that came around with the FCX Clarity, the new Odyssey does so with a similiar front cluster design, with a blue tinge frontal projector headlamp accompanied by nice, bright HIDs, as for the rear, it seems they've binned the radically designed rear clusters of the 3rd Gen Odyssey, in favor of a more conventional rear lamp clusters a la Estima.

Coming to the interior, the gear lever is moved away from the center dash to free up more space and it's pretty much obvious that the dash is now adapting the famous two tier design spawned from the Civic, which proves ergonomically wonderful and aesthetically sounding. The multimedia screen is housed in the center of the dash covered (from sunlight) by a hood, and there's something like a rounded, metallic controller a la iDrive that seems to be dominating the center dash. There seems to be also two very different trim levels of the interior, one came with individual armrest that's attached to the seats, another (presumably higher spec) comes with a center armrest that can be split folded (or opened up to reveal the console box. There's also a nice, large cubby hole with a sliding cover that was first seen in the Honda CRV. As for the second row bench seats, the middle seat can be folded to function as a tray or arm rest.

Overall, this seems like a very nice evolution of the current Odyssey, which still looks, goes, rides like a charm. There's also videos showing the new technologies that'll be applied to the new Odyssey, and another with Drift King Keichi Tsuchiya commenting on the new Odyssey. Head on over and check it out.