Reminds me of the other end of the spectrum with the horsepower wars. A lot of the manufacturers have roughly the same engine in a variety of different vehicles but either advertize the cheaper one with less power or put arbitrary limits on it so it has less power than a more expensive model purely for political reasons.

The most notorious example of this was the Camaro/Corvette back in 1998 when the Camaro got the Corvette's 345hp V8. Worse still, the Camaro would put down MORE power to the wheels because of it's more efficient solid axle than the Corvette's independant setup. Chevy chose to give the Camaro a horrible exhaust system to restrict power and advertized it at only 305hp, even though the two cars put down roughly the same power to the wheels once you put a decent exhuast on the Camaro.

Now we seem to be seeing Honda do the same thing with the Fit for the US market. They don't want a $14k car having 90% of the same fuel economy as their $22k hybrid. It's like Honda lost it's way a few years ago and no longer cared about making each vehicle as good as it could be. Instead, they adopted the big company view of brand loyalty and making people buy Honda, then having a lineup that neatly divided up among the models. The danger of this is that when people start to cross-shop vehicles, instead of seeing Honda as the top model for each segment, they may end up dismissing Honda's entire lineup based on one or two models that exist solely to fill in gaps in their product offerings. This is the problem GM has, really. They offer everything under the sun but have very few standouts and lots of filler. Honda should not be makin the same mistakes.