2018 Honda Civic vs Toyota Corolla

What's the difference?

A comfortable and convenient daily driver that ticks all the safety and tech boxes, the VTi-LX is a compelling offering given it is better value than the RS, and not overpriced for its spec level. 

What it lacks in an interesting powertrain it more than makes up for with its huge cabin space and well sorted ride. Whether you choose it or not could very well come down to the looks…

Toyota seems to be mostly waking up to what it takes to cut through in the contemporary car market. While the local arm sits on a pretty big pile of brand loyalty forged over years of delivering a solid-if-unspectacular product, its lunch is danger of being eaten by the various mouths of its rivals.

Have a good look at a Hyundai from 10 or more years ago - an attempt to clone Toyota's middle-of-the-road approach. Now they're a distinct brand with a strong focus on styling, dynamics and equipment. Toyota has grabbed two of those values and is lurching towards getting the third right.

Toyota will sell a squillion of these and probably for the first time I won't be wracking my brains trying to remember what it's like to drive. And while it's missing a few obvious bits and pieces, and the hybrid is very slow, the new car confirms how good TNGA is. Maybe, just maybe, Toyota is finally breaking free of building boring cars.

The look of the 10th-generation Civic is best described as polarising. There's a slew of hard angular edges pointing in all directions, which makes an overall design theme hard to pinpoint. The elegant curvature of the Mazda3, or the more conservative lines of the Hyundai Elantra and Subaru Impreza perhaps appeal to a wider audience.

As I mentioned earlier, the almost-as-well-equipped RS spec comes with some touches that could make all the difference here. The blacked-out bars across the RS’s front, side and rear compliment those angles a lot better, and the rear looks far more resolved with a spoiler (what are those rear light clusters pointing to?).

In comparison, the LX looks incredibly plain and, aside from those LED lights, it is honestly difficult to tell it apart from the VTi-L or even the base-model VTi. While subtlety might appeal to some, it’s an odd card to play for a flagship variant given the overall design of the Civic screams ‘look at me’.

The ‘Modern Steel’ grey colour of our test car rammed the plain-Jane look home. If it were my choice I’d go for the ‘Brilliant Sporty Blue’ as it suits the car’s angular aesthetic a little better. The only free colour is ‘Rally Red’.

The 17-inch alloys were also a topic of controversy in the office. Over my drive week I came to appreciate the milled-alloy with gloss-black highlight designs. Matt Campbell disagrees. I will concede they look smaller than 17-inches, likely due to the black highlights.

Inside is a better story. The angular design trend continues, but it’s all very ergonomic. None of the materials appear cheap or nasty, and there are more than a few soft finishes in the right places. It doesn’t have the symmetry of the Elantra’s interior, but I became very used to how comfortable it was.

Of particular note is the chunky, leather-bound steering wheel, and I have to give props to the low, sporty seating position.

Housed in the dash is a digital display which well laid-out, presents all the important information to the driver well, has a high frame-rate and seemed to never be subject to glare. It’s no premium bells & whistles experience like Audi’s Virtual Cockpit but is a nice addition nonetheless.

Well, here's something - a Corolla with genuine character. I'm not completely convinced (styling is subjective after all) but this is certainly a Corolla you can say is good looking.

The front is aggressive - particularly here in the ZR - with the right number of lines rather than the overdone designs of some other Toyotas. The big 18-inch wheels add a bit of dynamic tension to the look, its backside is almost shapely and the profile quite wedgy.

The bit that gets me is where the rear doors meet the C-pillar. It looks like the design team couldn't work out how to make it elegant, so they just closed their eyes and hoped for the best. Bit of a shame, really, given the clarity of the rest of the car.

The cabin is a huge step forward. Contemporary and shapely rather than a cheap plastic cliff face, it makes all the right moves and is made of good materials. The seats are absurdly sporty and equally comfortable, although even up here in the ZR they feature manual adjudstment.

The interior is so good that small, unfortunate details jar, like the clumsily placed seat-heater switches, which look and feel like they're straight out of a 1988 Toyota Crown. The big 8.0-inch screen dominates the dash with almost cinematic scale.

Does the Civic sedan look a little… big to you? That’s because it is. It’s massive inside. But somehow, it shares a wheelbase with the hatch.

It’s kind of magic, but that’s one of Honda’s fortes. Big practical interiors with some hidden surprises.

What surprised me the most though, is the ridiculous rear legroom. I had leagues of space behind my own driving position. How can this be if it has the same wheelbase as the hatch? 

Well, some investigation revealed that despite its near-identical looks, the sedan's cabin is physically different from the hatch, and an additional 34 millimetres of legroom is granted in the back. It doesn’t sound like much but makes a world of difference.

It legitimately has far more legroom than even some ‘large' sedans I’ve driven and ridden in, and the centre seat could fit an adult-sized human in decent comfort for a long-distance drive. Impressive.

The boot is also close to largest in the class. With the seats up, there’s 517 litres (VDA) of space on offer, which compares very well with the Mazda3 (408L), Elantra (458L) and Impreza (460L) but is just barely eclipsed by the new Kia Cerato (520L).

In the cockpit too, there’s plenty of stowage space under the centre console including two large movable cupholders (although without those little variable edges, so a tilt-risk for small stuff) plus some smallish cubbies in the doors for front and rear passengers. These won’t hold larger belongings or bottles, but they’re sufficient for smaller objects like wallets, books or keys.

Everything is also very easy to reach, but the sunroof eats a little headroom which could be a challenge for those over 182cm tall. I also had to question the choice of not including a dial for volume control. There are wheel-mounted buttons and a touch interface on the screen itself. But that’s kind of clunky when you need volume down in a hurry.

The new machine has a few more centimetres in each direction, but not many of them have been lavished on the occupants. Front-seat passengers have plenty of space but I did feel like the chunky dashboard towards the right-hand side makes getting in a bit more of a job than it perhaps should be.

Rear-seat passengers really aren't as well looked after as they are in some of the Corolla's rivals because those front seats - as brilliant as they are - have super-chunky backs. All of that bulk means it's pretty tight for me, all of 180cm, to sit behind my own driving position. My beanpole son wasn't a particularly happy camper back there, with his head brushing the ceiling and legs akimbo.

Front and rear-seat passengers score a pair of cupholders each and every door has a bottle holder. In the ZR you get a Qi wireless-charging pad, which is super handy if you have the right phone except you don't get a "Your phone is still in the vehicle" message, which would be good because you can't really see the phone once its in there.

The boot is pretty ho-hum in the rest of the range at 217 litres, but as the ZR goes without a spare tyre, there's a rather more generous 333 litres.

Straight off the bat, the top-of-the-range ZR with hybrid drivetrain is a surprisingly sharp $31,870, just $1500 more than the standard ZR. We start the list with 18-inch alloy wheels, moving on with an eight-speaker stereo, reversing camera, dual-zone climate control (with vents in the back - luxury!), keyless entry and start, active cruise control, sat nav, bi-LED headlights (and they are superb), heated front seats, head-up display, heated and folding electric mirrors and a tyre-repair kit.

With two rows of cheap and tiny buttons, the screen isn't particularly premium-feeling.

A huge 8.0-inch screen runs the eight-speaker stereo with USB, Bluetooth and DAB and (deep breath) still no Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. The screen's resolution is a bit muddy - it looks like Toyota has stretched an interface to fit the space. It's a better head unit than the rubbish one in Honda's C-HR and, for example, the Toyota 86, but with two rows of cheap and tiny buttons, not particularly premium-feeling.

Up this end of the Civic hierarchy, there’s just the one drivetrain. A 1.5-litre turbocharged petrol engine, producing 127kW/220Nm, mated only to a CVT auto. The Civic is front-drive only and, much to the dismay of old-school Civic fans, there's no manual option in sight.

That engine puts it middle of the pack compared to small sedan competitors. The enthusiast’s choice may be either the Mazda3 SP25 with a naturally aspirated 2.5-litre (138kW/250Nm) or the Hyundai Elantra SR Turbo which has an impressive 1.6-litre turbo (150kW/265Nm). Both of those can be had with a six-speed auto or DCT respectively (or, better yet, a six-speed manual option on either).

But the Civic still outshines the Cerato’s ordinary-all-round 112kW/192Nm 2.0-litre offering (which is also a bit thirsty) and Subaru’s infamously underpowered 115kW/196Nm non-turbo 2.0-litre engine which is also asked to pull a much heavier AWD layout.

Hybrid Corollas, as the name suggests, feature Toyota's hybrid powertrain. While the non-hybrid cars run a 125kW four-cylinder, this one has a 1.8-litre with a small battery and a modest electric motor.

As is usual, power output isn't especially straightfoward, so here goes. The 1.8 spins up 72kW/142Nm, which isn't a lot, but the electric motor brings 53kW/190Nm for a combined total system output of 90kW/190Nm.

That's not a huge chunk of power to push 1420kg along, let's be honest.

The e-CVT auto looks after getting the power to the front wheels. The system recharges the small battery when you lift off and when you're on the brakes, with an indicator to tell you what's happening in both in head-up display and the multimedia screen.

Honda’s smaller engine choice and CVT is designed to be frugal. On the combined cycle, Honda claims the VTi-LX will drink 6.0-litres to 100km. There’s not too much variation in the field with Mazda also claiming 6.0 for the SP25 Astina, and at the other end of the scale, there’s Kia’s Cerato which is touted to drink 7.4L/100km.

After a week of driving over a tank of petrol I scored 7.7L/100km which is closer to (but surprisingly less than) Honda’s urban estimate of 8.0L/100km.

Despite being turbo'd the VTi-LX will happily drink bargain-basement 91 unleaded, and the tank holds 47 litres.

The Corolla Hybrid's claimed combined fuel consumption figure is 4.2L/100km, which is the kind of number we've all heard before. Happily, a week with me saw the ZR return 5.2L/100km. I was not gentle, either. I'm genuinely impressed.

The Civic presents a strange dichotomy between the luxury spec and its sporty frame. As mentioned earlier, you sit nice and low in the Civic, and you have this chunky, well weighted steering wheel, giving you the illusion of sportiness at the helm.

It lives up to that by feeling nicely planted in the corners. This is largely due to all Civics having a more sophisticated independent rear suspension. Thankfully, it’s not a stiff tune either. It’s well sorted over bumpy stuff, there’s not a rattle to be heard in the cabin, and you don’t have to cringe every time you spot an incoming car park speed bump or unfortunately-positioned pothole.

The engine won’t exactly have you setting lap-times, however, and it’s a tad noisy in the cabin when it comes to really getting the power down somewhere past 2500rpm. 

Then, there’s the CVT. It truly isn’t the worst CVT I’ve ever driven (I’m looking at you, 1998 Nissan Micra…) and in terms of actual driving the experience isn’t dulled much. You should know it creates a slightly unpleasant rubbery characteristic, where your inputs feel delayed because it takes time for the CVT to react to changes through the driveline. 

For example, when laying off heavy acceleration, it will keep accelerating for half a second after you’ve taken your foot off. It’s a minor issue, but a noticeable one.

It also produces an annoying high-pitched whining sound at low speed and when you come to a full stop. You won’t be bothered by this if you drive around with the (actually great) 10-speaker stereo on most of the time, but you shouldn’t have to rely on it.

In terms of your ability to alter the engine’s characteristics, there’s an ‘Eco’ button which seems to make the CVT fight you as you try to extract revs out of it, and a sport mode on the transmission which seemed to make the accelerator a little more responsive and forced the CVT to act a bit more like a traditional auto.

Paddle-shift appears on the VTi-LX and RS grades but while the ‘gear changes’ they trigger didn’t have a long delay on them, they proved unsatisfying anyway.

First, let me say this car is quite slow. Despite its warm-hatch clothes, it's all mouth. A flattened throttle produces a reasonably smart step off the line with the electric motor's assistance, but after that it's mostly hydrocarbons and the CVT lawnmower effect.

Does it matter? Not really. As I've already covered, it's extremely light on the fuel and it's not often that you get that big a trade-off. It's also very quiet and if you jam a tennis ball under the accelerator you can switch to EV mode and maybe get two kilometres under electric power.

The new Corolla is by far the best I've driven. Even the previous model was pretty dull to drive, with little feel and a fairly ho-hum approach to ride and handling. It was so middle of the road Toyota may as well have painted double white lines along the car's centreline. The new car moves closer to the correct side of the road, the one where you don't forget what you're driving while you're driving it.

That doesn't mean the new Corolla has the dynamic poise of a Hyundai i30, because it doesn't. The front suspension is by the usual McPherson struts and the multi-link rear goes a long way to explaining the improvements but it's also down to the new platform, known as Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA), already found under the C-HR.

The TNGA platform has delivered a lower centre of gravity, which is critial in helping make the car feel a bit more tied down to the road. It's also stiffer, meaning it's quieter and despite having a ride-focused suspension tune, is reasonably handy in the corners. The 18-inch alloys on the ZR probably have a bit to do with that, along with wider tyres than the lower models.

(if ANCAP rated, stipulate when it was most recently tested)

The ZR has seven airbags, ABS, stability and traction controls, forward AEB with pedestrian detection and cyclist detection (during the day, curiously), reversing camera, adaptive cruise, lane-departure warning, lane-keep assist, traffic-sign recognition and active cornering control. There are two ISOFIX points and three top-tether anchor points.

Most of that gear is available across the range, which is impressive. Bizarrely, there are no rear parking sensors (or front ones, for that matter) which seems to be a Toyota and Subaru thing.

ANCAP awarded a maximum five-star safety rating in August 2018, just after its launch.

Honda offers a five-year/unlimited kilometre warranty across its range. This is great but should be the minimum.

It compares well in this segment to fellow Japanese competitors, the Mazda3 and Subaru Impreza, which fall behind with outdated three year/unlimited kilometre warranties. 

Hyundai is bang-on par with a similar five year/unlimited kilometre warranty, but the bar to beat, as ever, is Kia with its seven-year/unlimited kilometre promise on the Cerato.

Toyota's three-year/100,000km warranty is still with us. Just about every other competitor (except Volkswagen) has five years or more. You can buy up to a further three years and 150,000km if you want to bridge the gap.

The servicing regime is much better, though. Intervals are now 12 months/15,000km (previously it was every 6 months/10,000km) and for the first five years/75,000km, each service is $175 a pop.

Roadside assist is further $78 per year.