Very nice! My first attempt to capture ours - I think it used the moon to gauge exposure: That’s close to real life. Without the moon in the frame, the iPhone went into “Night Mode” and took a time exposure, which is pretty cool, if not realistic.
I like that color best too, but here in California the summers are hot and you really have to go with a light color exterior.
That’s the color I have. Specifically sought it out. It’s been winter for so long, I forgot how good it looks when clean.
In November, 2017, I let the dealer put my Clarity PHEV in the showroom for a week after I took it for a test drive (the photo at the left is from the showroom). Many asked the salespeople if they could get Moonlit Forest Pearl on their Accord, their Civic, or their CR-V, but not one person asked about the Clarity itself.
That's because they thought it was a fuel cell car. Why bother checking the badges? Most of the folks I've spoken to think of the FCX when they hear clarity. Damn shame, too, and one reason why I think sales were poor. If they'd badged it an Accord Sportback, they'd have sold more. I bought a 2018 phev touring in this color just last week. It's gorgeous. I am worried that I'll ruin the interior. Easily the nicest car I've ever owned.
None of the people that I have spoken to have ever even heard of the Clarity. Probably would have. And lost even more money. Not that I think they lost money on every Clarity sale, but it means they probably lost a sale of one of their much more profitable models.
I believe Honda lost money on every Clarity sold--especially because so many were sold below MSRP. There's no way all that battery and technology in a low-volume car made in Japan and shipped to North America could make a profit when selling for about the price of a similarly optioned Accord built in the US.
Not disagreeing with your premise, but technically speaking it's the factory incentives that affected profitability for Honda, not the selling price of the car. Selling below MSRP (or above) does not affect Honda, as that is the dealer's money at that point and affects only the dealer's profit. Honda is affected by the price that they sell the car to the dealer for (including holdbacks and all of that) as compared to their cost to manufacturer it. My theory is that Honda sold the PHEV Clarity to dealers at a price that was just above breakeven, and then set MSRP at the usual markup over dealer cost. Dealers, as with any car, could attempt to sell the Clarity at MSRP and make a tidy profit, or as in most cases discount off of MSRP to make the customer feel that they are getting a deal, while still making a profit. However when that's not working and cars are not moving fast enough, the manufacturer will step in with dealer incentives or direct to customer incentives. In that case it's the manufacturer who is giving up some (but usually not all) of their profits in order to get the cars to sell. In the case of Clarity I suspect that any amount of factory incentives for Clarity put Honda in the red, and since that eventually proved to be the only way they could sell Clarity in meaningful numbers, then yes at that point essentially each one was sold at a loss to Honda. But I still think that without any factory incentives Honda made at least something over breakeven, otherwise they would not have sold it nationwide, or at least attempted to. When they realized that it wouldn't sell without factory incentives they pulled back to the ZEV states where they could at least get some CARB credits, and then eventually to only California for the final two model years. The FCV Clarity meanwhile was clearly at a loss from the beginning, having a very low lease rate compared to estimates for what it actually cost Honda to produce, along with essentially free fuel for the entire lease, so clearly Honda lost money on each of those. On another site I saw where someone with a Clarity FCV had the fuel cell stack replaced under warranty, they saw the paperwork, it didn't have the breakdown but the total repair with labor was $58,000, so presumably the fuel cell itself was well over $50K. Of course that is retail price but still..... that's just crazy. The Clarity PHEV battery is listed at around $5,000 if I remember correctly.
