2010 Honda Element Lx Awd Automatic 4-door Suv on 2040-cars

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Are you the 2014 Honda Fit?

Despite being the oldest model in North America's subcompact sweepstakes, the current Honda Fit remains a paragon in its segment, offering unparalleled packaging, good road manners and robust reliability. In fact, even with far more modern competitors like the Chevrolet Sonic, Ford Fiesta, Hyundai Accent and Nissan Versa Note on the scene, it may well still be the best of the bunch.
All of which explains why we're so nervous about the next-generation model, shown in these apparently leaked stock shots scanned from an in-country magazine (no, that rear end really isn't that wonky, it's the page curl distorting the image).
Will the next Fit retain the current car's incredible seating flexibility? Will it still offer a sweet-shifting manual transmission and a four-cylinder seemingly happy to bounce off its rev limiter all the livelong day? We won't know until we try it, but if these shots are representative of what we can expect in North America, it certainly will look very different. While the same two-box shape with roughly the same greenhouse remains, the front end looks much more aggressive than before, with squinty-eyed headlamps blending into a Civic-like grille, all sitting over a lower fascia with unusually oversized air intakes. The profile view is dominated by the front quarterlight and a new sharply rising character line that originates in the front fenders and terminates in the headlamps.

McLaren-Honda goes 8-bit in Turbo Heroes

Formula One is all about speeding forward, but it's not without its spats of nostalgia – from retro liveries to a return to turbo power. Take, for example, this latest animated short from the McLaren-Honda team. It's called Turbo Heroes, and it sends us back to the days of our childhood in the 1980s and 90s in glorious 8-bit form. Part Street Fighter and part Aryton Senna's Super Monaco Grand Prix, Turbo Heroes is a game-style video short – the start to a series from the looks of things. It portrays an epic battle in which basic animated versions of Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso (coached by a grumpy Ron Dennis, no less) chase the evil Exhaustus in a race to recover the fabled (and equally fictitious) Jade Dragon of Suzuka to its rightful home in Japan. It's brought to you by the same team responsible for the Tooned series that was targeted at today's kids, only this one takes a decidedly different aesthetic approach. If you grew up around the same time as many of us here at Autoblog did, and got a kick out of films like Kung Fury and Scott Pilgrim vs The World, you'll probably enjoy this one. So put on your snapback, grab a can of Jolt Cola, and crank the ghetto blaster you've got hooked up to that Nintendo Entertainment System for a high-speed race down memory lane. You don't even have to blow in the cartridge.

Honda shows us 'The Challenging Spirit of Honda'... in Japanese

Just as Porsche has done with its lengthy Le Mans gear-up, Honda is is laying the table for its Formula One return more than a year before we'll actually see it on track. We've heard what it's 2015 engine will sound like, reminisced with the 1988 McLaren Honda MP4/4 and the 1964 Honda RA271 and spoken to the company's CEO about what F1 involvement could do for its production car engines.
The automaker has now released a video called The Challenging Spirit of Honda that traces the development of its in-house F1 program and the jump from motorcycles to the first RA270 F1 chassis in 1962, to the RA272 chassis that won the 1965 Grand Prix. The only catch: the video is in Japanese. However, you can read about the winning car in English, and the video ends with another sound check of the 2015 power unit. That is a universal language, and you'll find it being spoken below.