Honda Orthia

This is the catalogue record of the Honda Orthia, 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 1996. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Honda Orthia properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1990s were the decade of refinement — airbags and ABS became universal, Japanese build quality set the world standard, and the modern SUV segment was effectively invented. 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 Škoda Auto Škoda Octavia, the Lotus Cars Lotus Elise, the Porsche Porsche Boxster — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Honda Orthia reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engine / Petrol: / 1.3 L Honda D engine#D13 series engines (1.3 liter) / D13 Straight-four engine / I4 (Partner) / 1.5 L Honda D engine#D15 series engines (1.5 liter) / D15 ; quoted output is 91 PS (1.3 L) / 105 PS (1.5 L) / 120 PS (1.6 L) / 140 PS (1.8 L) / 145–150 PS (2.0 L); kerb weight is recorded at 1170 – (Orthia) / 1030 – (Partner); drive goes through 5-speed Manual transmission / manual / 4-speed Automatic transmission / automatic; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive layout / Front-engine, front-wheel-drive / Front-engine, four-wheel-drive layout / Front-engine, four-wheel-drive. Worked together, those figures give roughly 78 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. 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.

Its place in the Honda story

Within Honda's own catalogue the Honda Orthia sits alongside the Honda Envix, the Honda Crider, the HPD ARX-03, the Honda 0 SUV. The record names the Honda Civic (fourth generation)#Wagon / Honda Civic Shuttle (Orthia) / Honda Civic (fourth generation)#Japanese market / Honda Pro (Partner) as its predecessor and the Honda Airwave/Partner / Honda Stream as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at Japan: Suzuka, Mie.

How this catalogue works

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.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Honda Orthia 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.