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One thing I've always liked about Honda is its not-so-subtle way of poking a finger in the eye of its bigger, better-known competitors. In mid-January, the Japanese carmaker broke ranks with much of the rest of the industry when it told a congressional committee that making vehicles smaller and lighter in the interest of saving fuel doesn't necessarily make them less safe. The industry's standard line is that the higher Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards that Congress is seeking will ultimately result in more traffic deaths.
At the end of January, Honda took another little jab by flaunting its advanced power-train technology as another way to boost fuel economy. While General Motors, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler are still a year or more away from introducing their first gasoline-electric hybrids, Honda will start selling the 2003 Civic Hybrid on Apr. 1. The company recently invited a small group of auto writers to the California desert for a sneak peak at this second-generation effort. (In late 1999, Honda became the first auto maker to market a hybrid in the U.S., the quirky Insight two-seater.)
I spent a half-day driving two different Civic Hybrids in the communities surrounding Palm Springs, with a couple of short excursions into the nearby mountains to try them out on really twisty roads. Honda also had a couple of Insights on hand for comparison, as well as the only other hybrid car now sold in the U.S., a Toyota Prius.
SMALL CLUES. Here's the surprise: The Civic Hybrid is breathtakingly, well, normal. It looks like a Civic. It handles like a Civic. And, except for the very faint background whine of the electric motor, it sounds like a Civic.
What's remarkable is that Honda has been able to make the leap this soon to a car whose hybrid underpinnings are virtually invisible to the driver and passengers. Besides the word "hybrid" on the right rear of the car, very few clues give it away: The front grill is gone, the bumper has been slightly redesigned, and the rear deck sports a small spoiler. These changes were made to improve aerodynamics.
The trunk is slightly smaller, 10 cubic feet instead of 12, to make room for the battery pack that nestles behind the rear seat. Another hint that it's not your father's Honda is on the instrument panel, where a small gauge shows whether the batteries are boosting the gasoline engine or recharging it.
TWO GRAND EXTRA. And that's how Honda is positioning the car -- not so much as a gee-whiz hybrid but as a top-of-the-line model in the Civic family. Honda says it will price the car at just under $20,000 -- $1,000 more for automatic transmission. That's about $2,000 more than today's top-of-the-line Civic EX model, and the hybrid will come with side air bags, antilock brakes, and alloy wheels as standard equipment.
Honda also dressed up the interior with upscale fabric, a brushed-aluminum console, and faux wood trim on the dash. So the premium for the hybrid power plant over the Civic's conventional 1.7-liter, 115-horsepower gasoline engine is only about $1,000.
For that, though, you'll get a 47% jump in fuel economy, to 47 miles per gallon in the city and 51 mpg on the road with the manual transmission -- the best performance of any mass-produced, five-passenger, gasoline-engine car. That's largely because the Civic Hybrid uses a 1.3 liter, 85-hp gasoline engine instead of the 1.7-liter engine. But the hybrid also has a battery-run 13-hp electric motor that kicks in when you need it -- such as for better acceleration. The batteries are automatically recharged during deceleration and braking.
GEEKY PIONEERS. Only the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius can top the new Civic Hybrid in fuel economy, and they're both technology showcases. And in comparison to the Civic, those two earlier cars are downright geeky. The tiny Insight, which Honda will continue to sell, has a lightweight aluminum body and is built in a special factory. The Prius, with its rear seat and more conventional styling, is much more practical for most buyers, but Toyota's hybrid system feels far more primitive, with grabby brakes and lots of drag on the car when it's coasting.
Still, consumers have been voting for practicality: In the past two years, Toyota has sold 21,118 Prius cars in the U.S., nearly three times the number of Insights Honda has sold.
The carmaker thinks it can do much better with the Civic Hybrid. Honda plans to sell 24,000 of them a year. That's a small fraction of total Civic sales, which at 330,000 a year make it the country's best-selling compact car. More important, Honda's new Civic promises to propel hybrids into the real world -- and at a time when its competitors are still tinkering with hybrid vehicles as science projects.
By Larry Armstrong in Los Angeles Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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Copyright 2002 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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