(02 Jun 05)

Honda's performance in the 2005 International Engine of the Year Awards wasn't quite as splendid as it has been in the past, but the company still picked up a couple of trophies. One of these went to the little hybrid IMA unit found in the Insight. This won the overall award back in 2000, and it has been voted first in the up to one litre category every year since then.

Given that it's quite a clever piece of work, and that hardly anyone is building such small engines these days, it's frankly quite difficult to see how the IMA can be prized out of this position in the near future, so you may be reading a similar story in June 2006.

Honda also won the 2.0-2.5 litre class with a first time-entry, the 2.2 i-CTDi turbo diesel. This first appeared in the Accord, and has since been fitted to the CR-V SUV and the fiendishly cunning HR-V six-seater. Before it was introduced, Honda people were keen to boast that this was going to be "the best diesel engine in the world". They don't talk about it in quite those terms nowadays, but this award suggests that their confidence was well-placed.

Members of the judging panel were certainly not short of compliments. "Power, economy, sound - everything puts this diesel at the top of four-cylinder engines" was the official view.

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