Here's A Rare Chance To Own An Awesome Honda Beat

The Beat is a mid-engined, rear-wheel drive Kei car with a tiny power output and a big heart. This example's reasonably priced and has us tempted

Matt Robinson

16 Jun 2016

Here's A Rare Chance To Own An Awesome Honda Beat

On paper, the concept of a Kei sports car seems a bit daft. Why bother trying to make something sporty for a segment of the Japanese market which restricts you to 660cc and 63bhp? And yet, these dinky little roadsters and coupes are hugely tempting, and few fill us with quite so much lust as the mid-engined Honda Beat.

Yes, it’s far from fast, but the idea of thrashing its tiny three-pot up to the buzzy 10,000rpm redline while exploiting the diminutive mid-engine chassis is a very tempting prospect. As a bonus, it looks pretty cool too - in its own cutesy way - and would you just look at those tiger print seats!

The issue with these is that they were never officially sold in the UK, which means if you want one, you’ll have only the very few that were imported to choose from. What’s more, prices do seem to be on the rise.

However, there are still reasonably priced Beats available, such as this 1991 example, currently owned by CTzen and CT friend Ollie Evans. The advert is one of those rarely seen, reassuringly long and detailed affairs, and the car - which has 61,000 miles on the clock - looks to be in good nick. It’s up for £3500.

Tempted?

Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.

Comments

Want want want want want

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Looks like a CBR1000RR engine and a sequential gearbox could find a lovely home in this.

The CBR1000RR has a sequential gearbox built into it i think :)

But does it VTEC?

The Beat,

It’s sort of like a really bad bar joke, because the good thing is, you can say you have a mid-engined car and they’ll think it’s a supercar, then they see it and be like ‘’but that’s a f*cking honda dude’’