Beat and S660

Kei-Car Sports Cars: The Honda Beat and S660 (1991–1996; 2015–2022)

Japan's kei-car category exists because of a regulatory ceiling, not because of any particular design philosophy: cars built to a maximum displacement and, later, a maximum footprint and power output qualify for lower taxes and reduced parking and licensing requirements. Effective 1 January 1990, Japanese regulators raised the displacement ceiling from 550cc to 660cc and, for the first time, imposed a self-regulatory 63 PS power cap across the industry. It was into that freshly redrawn box that Honda dropped the Beat, a car that took a regulatory constraint most manufacturers treated as an economy-car problem and answered it instead with a genuine, mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive roadster.

The Beat's styling did not come from inside Honda's own studios. The company commissioned the Italian coachbuilder Pininfarina, a name associated with Ferrari and Lancia, not with 660cc city cars. In turn, Pininfarina subcontracted the actual design work to a freelance stylist, Pavel Hušek. The result was the first mass-production Japanese car styled by that storied Turin house, an unusual pedigree for a car that, on paper, competed against kei-class hatchbacks and microvans. The mechanical layout matched the design ambition: a rear-mid-mounted, naturally aspirated 656cc three-cylinder engine with individual throttle bodies for each cylinder, driving the rear wheels, at a moment when most kei-class rivals reached the same 63 PS ceiling through turbocharging rather than through a sporting induction system tuned to rev cleanly. The Beat, in other words, was engineered like a small sports car that happened to be legally classified alongside Japan's cheapest, most utilitarian vehicles.

The car reached Japanese showrooms in May 1991, and it carries a particular historical weight inside Honda's own corporate memory: by most accounts it was the last new model personally approved by company founder Soichiro Honda before his death that August. That the founder's final sign-off went to a small, characterful, mechanically ambitious roadster rather than to a mainstream sedan or minivan fits neatly with a pattern that runs back to 1963: Honda's recurring instinct, across nearly three decades and multiple corporate eras, to let a small sports car carry an outsized amount of engineering pride relative to its market size.

Commercial reality caught up with the Beat quickly, though. Roughly two-thirds of its entire lifetime production occurred within the first eighteen months on sale, after which demand fell away sharply. That pattern is common to low-volume specialty cars once the initial wave of committed early adopters has been satisfied, but it meant the Beat's five-year production run, ending in February 1996, produced a relatively modest total in the low tens of thousands. Unlike the S-series before it, the Beat's discontinuation left an even longer wait before Honda tried the formula again: nearly two decades passed with no mid-engine kei roadster in Honda's lineup at all.

That wait ended in April 2015 with the S660, which returned to the same regulatory box (660cc displacement, 63 PS ceiling, mid-engine, rear-drive, roadster body) but answered it differently under the skin. Where the Beat had relied on natural aspiration and per-cylinder throttle bodies to reach its power ceiling, the S660 used a turbocharged three-cylinder engine. In the intervening two decades, turbocharging had become the standard route to the kei-class power cap. The engine was paired with either a six-speed manual or a CVT depending on buyer preference. The S660 arrived to strong initial demand, selling in the neighborhood of nine thousand units in its debut year and reaching its sales peak the following year at just over ten thousand, before tapering. That was, again, a familiar shape for a low-volume specialty car working through its initial order bank.

Honda announced in March 2021 that S660 production would end in March 2022, closing out a run that reportedly totaled more than thirty thousand cars. What happened next says something about how the S660 had been received by its core audience: the discontinuation announcement itself drove a fresh surge of orders strong enough that Honda added roughly 650 extra units to the planned final run before actually closing the line, effectively extending the car's life by public demand rather than by its own original production plan. It was a small, distinctly Japanese-market echo of the affection that had gathered around the S2000 a decade earlier. That car was another Honda roadster whose end-of-life announcement generated more enthusiasm than most of its years on sale had.

Taken together, the Beat and the S660 form a distinct thread inside Honda's sports-car history, separate from the S-series and the NSX: proof that Honda's willingness to build a genuinely engineering-driven driver's car did not stop at the boundary of Japan's kei-car tax and licensing rules, and that the same corporate instinct that sent Soichiro Honda to Suzuka in a 360cc prototype in 1962 was still recognizable in a company signing off on a Pininfarina-styled 660cc mid-engine roadster three decades later, and again in one built to the same rulebook three decades after that.

Kei Roadsters in the Digital Garage

The Beat and S660 have a second life inside one of the best-selling racing-game franchises in the world. According to Gran Turismo fan-community tracking of each game's car list, the Beat first appeared in Gran Turismo 2 and has been carried forward into essentially every mainline installment since, missing only from Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec. That is an unusually long and consistent run for a car that never sold outside Japan and never raced professionally. The S660 picked up the same digital afterlife a generation later, added to Gran Turismo Sport and carried into Gran Turismo 7, giving Honda's two mid-engine kei roadsters a continuous, thirty-year presence in the series even during the two-decade real-world break between them. For a pair of cars built to a Japanese tax-and-licensing rulebook that most of the world's driving-game audience has never had to think about, that kind of staying power inside a global franchise is its own small piece of evidence for how much genuine enthusiasm these two little roadsters generated relative to their size.