The small electric car has had a difficult few years. Not because nobody wants one, but because the ones on offer have been priced as though they were luxury goods rather than practical transport, and because the ones that got the design right — the Honda E, the original Fiat 500e — tended to have ranges that required you to plan your life around them. The Honda E launched in 2020 at nearly £40,000. For a car with a real-world range of about 125 miles. Honda, to their credit, has learned from this episode rather than simply pretending it didn’t happen.
The Honda Super-N, which goes on sale in the UK in July 2026 for less than £20,000, is the result of that learning. It is not the Honda E. They would like you to know this. It doesn’t share the E’s platform, its rear-wheel drive layout, its bespoke chassis, its aquarium function, or its pricing strategy. What it shares is the spirit — the basic conviction that a small electric city car should have some character and be worth talking about.
The Super-N is built on the platform of the Honda N-One, a kei car — a class of small, upright, maximally space-efficient vehicles that Japan uses to solve the eternal problem of fitting normal-sized human beings into abnormal amounts of traffic. The engineering logic is simple and refreshing: the N-One’s research and development costs were largely absorbed during its life as a petrol car, which means the electric version can be priced at what a car of this size should actually cost. It weighs just over one tonne. For reference, this is roughly half a standard Range Rover, and considerably more honest.
For the UK market, Honda has widened the track, added blistered wheel arches, fitted larger wheels and tyres — 185/55 15-inch Yokohamas — and given it a wider stance that pushes it just beyond the strict kei car dimensions. The battery is a 29.6 kWh unit, which delivers a real-world combined range of 128 miles and a city range, relevant to most of its likely use, of up to 199 miles. Maximum DC rapid charging speed is 50 kW, which is modest by current standards but entirely appropriate for a battery of this size. You are not going to take this car on a road trip to the south of France. You are going to drive it around a city, charge it overnight at home, and enjoy it enormously.
The design references the Honda City Turbo II from the early 1980s — a turbocharged, intercooled, boxy little city car that had its own racing series, starred in adverts featuring Madness, and was optionally sold with a folding motorcycle that lived in its boot. Honda is not pretending the Super-N is a retro car. It is not a retro car. It is a modern car that has looked at one of the best-designed small cars of the last 50 years and borrowed liberally from it: the boxy arches, the angular side vents, the seat silhouettes, the general atmosphere of a car that is small but refuses to be shy about it.
Inside, it is refreshingly simple. Physical knobs for the HVAC. A modestly-sized touchscreen that does what it needs to do without dominating the dashboard. A heated steering wheel as standard. A Bose audio system hiding a subwoofer under the boot floor. And, perhaps most amusingly, a Boost mode, activated by a blue button on the steering wheel, which raises power output from 47 kW to 70 kW, bathes the interior in purple light, engages a simulated seven-speed paddleshift gearbox with artificial shift sensations, and plays synthesised engine noise through the speakers. In normal mode the Super-N produces 63 horsepower. In Boost mode it produces 94 horsepower. For context, the new Renault Twingo produces 82 horsepower. These are light little cars.
Boost mode is not a serious performance feature. It is an act of personality. It is Honda saying that driving a small electric car should be fun and slightly absurd rather than earnest and slightly grim. Hyundai has been doing something similar with its Ioniq 5 N, which also uses simulated gearshifts and artificial sound, and it has been received considerably better than the cynics expected. Honda appears to have noticed.
The practical case for the Super-N is straightforward. It is the only electric Honda currently on sale in the UK. It arrives into a segment containing the Renault Twingo, the Hyundai Inster, the Fiat 500e, and various Chinese arrivals, all at roughly similar prices. What it has over most of them is character — a design that is immediately recognisable, a driving experience that has been specifically engineered to feel engaging rather than merely efficient, and a price point that finally makes the small electric city car proposition make sense. The Honda E was a wonderful object that almost nobody could afford and almost everybody admired. The Super-N is trying to be the car that people actually buy.
Order books open in June. The purple two-tone is a real option. It seems like the right choice.
