Honda Life
Honda
Honda
This is the catalogue record of the Honda Life, one of 277 models Honda has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1971. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Honda Life properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Renault Renault 5, the American Motors Corporation AMC Gremlin, the Chevrolet Chevrolet Impala — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Honda Life reads like this: the record lists its engine as 356 cc EA Straight-twin engine; kerb weight is recorded at 480 -; drive goes through 3/4/5-speed manual / 3-speed Hondamatic automatic; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Honda's own catalogue the Honda Life sits alongside the Honda Envix, the Honda Crider, the HPD ARX-03, the Honda 0 SUV. The record names the Honda Today (1997) as its predecessor and the Honda N-One / Honda N-Box / Honda N-WGN as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at Suzuka Plant, Suzuka, Mie, Japan.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
The catalogue records what the Honda Life was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.