Honda CR-Z Finds Tuner Love at SEMA Show







LAS VEGAS — Honda once owned the aftermarket turner market, but about a decade ago, the Japanese automaker started bringing out more mild-mannered models that intentionally turned away from the high-performance crowd. Now, it appears Honda wants at least part of that market back, and a collection of radically tweaked CR-Z hybrids on display at this year’s SEMA Show is meant to do just that.



“Green means go” is a theme that is prominently espoused at the Honda stand. “We’ve reached out to the import tuner community and asked them to push the CR-Z’s limits,” said Chris Martin, a Honda spokesman.



The most outrageous of the 12 concepts was the Honda CR-Z from Bisimoto Engineering of Ontario, Calif., which claims to have wrung 533 horsepower out of the tiny 1.5-liter engine that comes with the car from the Honda factory.



“There’s more to come,” said the company’s founder, Bisi Ezerioha. “Honda only gave us the car in August.”



Mr. Ezerioha said the only limitation he placed on his juicing up of the powertrain was to “retain its eco-friendly properties.” To that end, he claimed, his creation “gets slightly better than the advertised fuel economy” of a stock CR-Z, which is 31 miles per gallon in the city and 37 on the highway.



“It still run on unleaded,” he added.







Mr. Ezerioha wouldn’t give away all his tuning secrets, but said he had radically reworked the exhaust system to reduce power-robbing back pressure, reconfigured the intake and exhaust manifolds, added a Kinsler fuel injection system, substituted higher compression ratio pistons, and — besides a long list of other improvements — added a Turbonetics turbocharger, blow-off and a massive intercooler.



“The intercooler might have been a bit of overkill,” he said. He also copped to winding the turbo up to about 20 pounds of boost. “But we could go higher.”



Mr. Ezerioha said he intended to bring out a line of CR-Z go-fast accessories for the public to purchase. American Honda is also planning to offer CR-Z performance parts.



Honda Performance Development, a high-performance in-house arm of American Honda, also unveiled two concepts it had produced: the CR-Z Hybrid R Concept and the HPD CR-Z Racer. Besides some performance modifications, including turbocharging, to the 1.5-liter engine, the concepts have a new type of battery pack that uses a nickel-magnesium-cobalt composition, instead of the stock nickel-metal-hydride version. A result is boosting the stock power output from 122 horsepower to 200 horsepower (and 175 pound-feet of torque).







Around this week’s sprawling SEMA Show, which occupies nearly a million square feet of exhibition space at the Las Vegas Convention Center, it appeared the CR-Z was the object of loving attention from a number of customizers.



“The combination of greener practicality with style and fun makes this vehicle a perfect fit for young, environmentally conscious buyers,” said Bruce Smith, American Honda’s vice president of parts operations, “especially those looking to further personalize their cars.”