2014 Honda City India-8

Honda will be unveiling a next generation Honda City Hybrid next year. This was revealed in a speech by Sho Minekawa, Managing Officer and Chief Operating Officer for Regional Sales Operations for Honda at the 2013 Tokyo Motor Show. The City Hybrid will come after the unveiling of the regular engined Honda City by the end of this month in India.

UPDATE: The fourth-gen Honda City has been officially revealed – click here for the report and pics.

The new Honda City will be available with both a regular combustion engine as well as a hybrid powertrain. This would be the City’s natural progression as every other Honda B-segment car based on the same platform as the new City now has a hybrid version – the new Honda Fit/Jazz, the Fit Shuttle, the Honda Freed and most recently the Honda Vezel B-segment SUV.

This new B-segment sedan will be a new entrant for the Japanese market and is set to debut in Spring 2013. That would be sometime in Q2 2014. Honda previously sold the second-generation City as the Fit Aria in Japan, but the third generation currently on sale in Malaysia was never launched. The new Honda City will be launched exclusively with a hybrid engine in Japan.

Honda’s strategy for Japan is for every sedan model to be exclusively available with a hybrid powertrain. This is true for the current generation Accord. However, while this model is confirmed for the Asia Pacific market and will be launched in that region before Japan, some markets will get the hybrid version and others would only get the normal combustion engine car.

If Honda Malaysia moves to launch a Honda City Hybrid in Malaysia, we think the Honda Insight could be discontinued as the two cars seem like they overlap in the same segment.

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