A few factors may be at play in this: 1) historical sales for the Insight predicts a smaller market in Canada (e.g. cold temp impact on hybrid); 2) the G3 Insight is produced in the US, then shipped abroad (separate/smaller production runs for Canada). Looking at additional data on the site you referenced:
- Canada sales for a model year starts later than US (e.g. 2019 Civic YTD sales = 0 in Canada, 107k in US)
- At prior peak sales for the Insight (2010), Canadian Insight sales were only 5% as large as US Insight sales.
- Also in prior peak year for the Insight (2010), the G2 Insight was 'only' 2% the size of the Civic market in Canada.
When it comes to data forecasting (which I do a lot of daily... thus data geek), the saying is "the past predicts the future." And a comparison of calculations/methods is used to validate forecast predictions. So if I had the above data and were Honda, starting forecast predictions for the Insight would be:
- 2% of Canadian Civic market = 56091 sold in 2018 x 2% = 1122 Insight forecasted sales in Canada
- 5% of US Insight sales = 20000 unit projected sales x 5% = 1000 Insight forecasted sales in Canada
Both calculation methods based on historical sales predict that Canada should sell ~1k Insights in a year. But with the later (-6 mo) start in Canadian sales, this number could be half that (500 Insights sold in Canada for the 2019 model year).
Production decisions are based on forecast calculations like this, so unfortunately it can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy -
i.e. "don't build it and they won't come." I'm sure Honda also cross-references Toyota Prius sales data in the same way to decide how much to produce by country. Overall, I think the Canadian hybrid sales/market would need to make a big step change before Honda is prompted to produce more Insights for Canada.
