TRUE JOYRIDE

TRUE JOYRIDE

Adhish Alawani takes the wheel of Honda’s refurbished Civic    in Bengaluru and happily cruises back to Pune via Chennai

 

Last month, Aspi made me an offer I could not resist. The FIM Asian Road Racing Championship was arriving in Chennai and being a hardcore motorsports fan, I did not want to miss it. Our Editor asked me to drive the facelifted Civic from Pune to Chennai and back. Unfortunately though, the car was going to be provided to us in Bengaluru. Nonetheless, we picked up the Civic from there and decided to drive it down to Chennai and later get it to Pune.

Aspi and I flew down to Bengaluru where Navaroze, our Editor-at-Large, was waiting for us at the airport with the revamped Civic right next to him. With the first look at the Honda, I could figure out that the midlife facelift had installed a few cosmetic upgrades on the car. The headlamps get a smoky treatment now and a new mesh grille sits behind the bold, chrome Honda badge. The front bumper has been re-profiled a bit, which of course is not recognizable to the layman’s eyes. Moving to the rear, I spotted the new octagonal tail lamps that have replaced the circular ones found on the previous version. The headlamps and the front grille looked good to me but not the tail. The classy circular lamps at the rear are still my preferred choice. Apart from these bits, there are new alloy wheels for the top end automatic version. This one, being the manual transmission variant, had the same old set of alloys. Leaving these changes aside, there is not much else that can distinguish the facelifted Civic from its predecessor.

The first leg of our trip from Bengaluru to Chennai was roughly 320km. With Aspi deciding to drive during the first leg and Navaroze taking the passenger seat, I decided to take this opportunity to gauge the Civic’s rear seat comfort. The car offers plush seating at the rear with adequate legroom. The rear seats get audio controls on the centre armrest. Though there aren’t AC vents at the rear, I didn’t miss them thanks to the powerful AC of the car that takes care of the rear passengers pretty well. Taking the NH7, we crossed Hosur to enter Tamil Nadu from where the roads improved drastically and allowed Aspi to fly the Civic at 150km/h on the brilliant highways. With open roads ahead and absolutely no crossroads for kilometers at a stretch, it was no doubt one of the best terrains to drive on.

 

 

The Civic has always had an aggression. The smoky headlamps further add to the belligerent front end	The instrument console of the older Civic has been retained. However, it now includes an overall fuel efficiency indicator	The new octagonal tail lamps are not my choice. I would still prefer the classy round ones	The last refuel on the way back to Pune left us shocked as we calculated the fuel efficiency which was close to 14.5kmpl