#Honda navigation update review driver#

Meanwhile, the Honda's 1.8-liter mill outputs 140 horsepower and 128 pound-feet of torque, a reasonable amount of power for an engine of this size. The Econ button boosts your mpg by a few ticks, but robs the Civic of valuable performance in the process. The Civic absorbed the bumps with the ease of a crossover with only the lightest thump-thump being transmitted into the cabin. We took the sedan over a stretch of Oakland's I-580 that is notorious for its pronounced expansion joints, a stretch of freeway that usually causes short-wheelbase vehicles to rock violently and loudly from front to back. The new Civic's suspension also more readily absorbs road noise and bumps. In the void where fun used to live, comfort now resides. It's not that the Civic isn't capable of rounding a bend as quickly as the previous generation, but it does so without letting you in on the fun. The light power steering that makes the car easy to pilot one-handed around parking lots leads to a slightly mushy and disconnected feel at speed.

However, this new generation separates the driver from the road in its pursuit of comfort. The Civic's underpinnings seem to be capable of the same feats of grin-inducing cornering that made famous the Civics of old. To a degree, these properties are still there, but as the sedan has grown up and become more sensible, its reflexes have been dulled slightly. The Civic's strongest attributes used to be its zippy handling and peppy engine. The Civic's cabin was noticeably quieter than its competitors'-so much so that we were able to hear the slight echo of our voices from the windshield and hard dashboard surfaces when conversing with passengers. If Honda somewhat cheaped out on the dashboard materials, it must have spent the saved money on sound deadening. The bilevel instrument cluster seems less like the bridge of a spaceship now that we've had a few years to acclimate, but the new hard dashboard materials do visually cheapen the Honda's interior, and drew comments from our passengers. The sedan offers good headroom and shoulder room, with controls that fall nicely into the hand. The Civic's greenhouse offers exceptional 360-degree visibility, reducing blind spots and making parallel parking a breeze, even without a rearview camera option available. However, while change is normally good, Honda seems to have benefited from keeping intact those attributes of the Civic sedan that make it a safe decision for level-headed adults. Only in direct comparison do the changes to the 2012 Civic (top) become apparent. The headlights, taillamps, and bumpers have all been tweaked and massaged, but the broad strokes of this new Civic are the same as they ever were.

Unless you see one side-by-side with a model of the previous generation, you'd be hard-pressed to tell that Honda had made any changes to this new 2012 model. The more things change, the more they stay the same We've put the 2012 Honda Civic EX-L to the test to see if it's still this segment's golden child or if it has been outclassed by the upstarts. So it's no wonder that we were disappointed when the ninth-generation Honda Civic showed up at the 2011 Detroit auto show looking and sounding almost identical to the outgoing model. The competition from Ford, Hyundai, and others has undergone quite a few evolutionary leaps, meeting or beating the eighth-generation Civic in many metrics.

However, the past few years have seen a revolution in the small-car market. There was once a time when the Honda Civic was the de facto recommendation for a new car in its class.

#Honda navigation update review driver#