Honda Civic Hybrid 2012 review

Over a decade ago Honda brought the first ever mass-produced hybrid to Australia early in 2001. The Honda Insight was something out of the ordinary not only in its petrol-electric powertrain, but also in its radical styling.

Value

Sales have been slow for the Insight and its original near-$50,000 price tagin 2001 didn't help either - you could get into a mid-range Honda Civic for less than half of that. Honda quickly learned its lesson, so from 2004 began to import Civic hybrids rather than Insights. These have been moderately successful in the sales race over the years.

In its strong push towards clean, green vehicles Honda now sells three hybrids in Australia: the Civic which is the subject of this test, the sporting CR-Z that picked up Wheels magazine’s car of the year award in 2011, and new Honda Insight. The latter being considerably more mainstream than the model that held that name 10 years back, though with a good dash of individuality.

With the new model Civic hybrid for 2012 Honda is making a strong sales and marketing push. Amongst other methods it gave several motoring journalists the opportunity to live with a Civic hybrid for six months. We are now halfway through that period and are thoroughly enjoying the experience.

Design

The Civic hybrid loses a little boot space to house its battery but is better than many older generation hybrids. As the battery sits upright behind the rear seat here’s no fold-down facility to let you carry extra long items within the car. Interior space is fine for four adults, with room in the centre-rear for another without too much discomfort. Despite the sleek appearance of the body headroom in the Civic is fine.

There’s a big emphasis on in-car entertainment and communication in the all-new Civic, with a screen in the right-centre of the dash devoted to phone, iPod and audio systems. These are controlled by buttons on the steering wheel to minimise - but obviously not eliminate - driver distraction.

Technology

Owners of turbo-diesel cars, particularly those built in Europe, will point out that they can achieve similarly low fuel figures. However there’s a lot more to saving fuel when it comes to trimming the danger vehicles can cause to the air we breathe. Diesels put out significantly more CO2 than petrol-hybrids; as an example the Honda Civic hybrid is rated at 104 grams per kilometre in the Green Vehicle Guide, whereas diesel cars of this size typically push out 150 to 160 grams - a huge difference.

Having covered almost 2000 km to date, we have found the Honda Civic hybrid using fuel in the range of 5.6 to 6.2 litres per hundred kilometres in commuter driving in town. This can be pulled down to the high fours on motorways while still flowing along easily with the traffic. A mixture of city and country driving usually had the fuel meter sitting in the low to mid fives.

Driving

Major changes have been made to the electric motor and it is now powered by a lithium-ion battery in place of the nickel-metal-hydride of the previous model. This gives the Civic hybrid added torque off the line and it has plenty of performance for day-to-day driving. The petrol engine stops completely once the speed gets below about 10 km/h. It restarts as soon as you want to move off again.

Because the ‘starter motor’ is the same one that helps drive the car, restarting is significantly smoother than that of a normal four-cylinder engine with a stop-start feature. The driver can select between economy and performance in several ways. As in many recent Hondas (not just hybrids) you can push an ‘Econ’ button to go for minimum fuel consumption.

We found that using this can trim as much as five per cent off the routine fuel use. On the downside it really does deaden the feel of the engine and we weren’t all that keen on it. There’s also a Sports mode if you really wanting to pedal along hard and it certainly adds a fair bit of oomph to the performance. In reality we seldom felt any need for this as the hybrid isn’t that sort of car.