Honda Beat

Honda Beat (PP1, 1991 to 1996): the buyer's guide

A 656cc triple that howls to 8,100rpm, with the roof folded down

Here is the thing that catches people out about the Beat. It is a kei car, so it is the size of a big shopping trolley, and yet Honda gave it the layout of a proper sports car. The engine sits behind you in the middle, it drives the rear wheels, and the whole roof folds away into a soft-top. That is a mid-engine convertible you could park in a hallway, and Honda sold it to normal people from 1991 to 1996.

There is a lovely bit of folklore attached too. The Beat is widely said to be the last car Soichiro Honda signed off before he passed away in 1991. It gets repeated everywhere and it is on the car's Wikipedia page, though I would treat it as a well-loved story rather than a stamped fact, because the harder sourcing is a bit thin.

The clever part is under the deck. The E07A is a 656cc naturally aspirated triple, and while the turbo kei cars of the day leaned on boost, Honda went the other way. It runs individual throttle bodies and Honda's MTREC setup, and it spins all the way to about 8,100rpm. Kei rules capped everyone at 64 PS, and the Beat makes the lot of it right up at the top, so you have to wring its neck to get anywhere. That is the whole charm. It is slow-car-fast in its purest form, a little engine that sounds and behaves like a superbike motor.

Context matters here, because the Beat is one third of the ABC trio, the run of kei sports cars that all landed around the same time: the Autozam AZ-1, the Honda Beat and the Suzuki Cappuccino. The Beat is the drop-top of the family. Honda built roughly 33,600 of them, and by most accounts about two thirds of those went out the door in that first year, so it sold hard early and then tailed off.

So why would you buy one? Because there is nothing else quite like a mid-engine Honda roadster that revs like a race bike and costs about as much as a used hatchback. It is cheap fun with a devoted following, and every drive ends with a stupid grin. You do not go fast in a Beat so much as feel fast, which honestly is the better trick.

Now the buyer's homework, because these are getting on for thirty years old. Rust is the big one, so get right under it and check the sills and the floors, the usual spots a small Japanese car of this age hides its sins. Look hard at the soft top and its plastic rear window, as a tired one is money and a pain to sort. On the engine, make sure the timing belt has been done, and be wary of anything that has sat for years, gone stiff or seized. Trim is the sting in the tail, because the interior plastics and the Beat-only bits are drying up and getting dear. My advice is simple. A rust-free honest car will always be worth more than a cheap rough one, no matter how tempting the price on the rough one looks.