A true winner

Honda Accord’s place as 2018 Canadian Car of the Year ‘well-deserved’

Too many awards these days are bought and paid for — ever wonder how those various consumers’ choice awards survive? — and carmakers can pad the trophy cases at headquarters for relatively paltry sums.

It’s true that for many consumers’ choice awards, some consumers have chosen your product, but before winning, your company has to fork over an entry fee. Convenient, right? You didn’t even know you were entered and someone’s sending you an invoice. Decline, and the award goes to the next company on the list willing to pony up. Was the winner No. 1? No. 2? No. 12? You’ll never know.

You can, therefore, take many awards with several grains of salt, even a good number in the automotive field. Sucks to find out how the sausage is made, doesn’t it?

I may be biased, having been a juror for 17 of the past 18 years, but try as my skeptical self might, I can’t see how the Canadian Car of the Year award — given for 2018 to the subject vehicle, the 2018 Honda Accord — could be bought. Particularly this year. Carmakers get entries into the program with their membership in the Automobile Journalists’ Association of Canada, which runs the award. Members across Canada — even those who didn’t attend TestFest, the yearly selection camp — vote on the winners.

Each carmaker pays the same fee. As many as 100 journalists drive the vehicles as part of their yearly round of test drives — some drive the car in February’s cold, some in July’s steam — and often, you’re driving cars without knowing they’re even entered.

We find out who wins the same time you do: when the Car of the Year committee stands up at the Canadian International Auto Show in February and opens the envelope from accounting giant KPMG and announces the winners.

All of this is to say, having spent a week with this year’s winner, AJAC got it right.

The new Accord is brilliant, from head to toe.

I’m driving the 2.0, employing a 2.0-litre turbo engine and a 10-speed automatic transmission. This is the new top of the line: The V-6 has been relegated to history. You won’t miss it. Really.

What you might miss is a stick. You can still get one, but you either have to get a base engine or get an upper-level Sport with the 2.0 engine. Nice it’s still available, too bad it’s on limited models.

The 10-speed is vastly superior to the CVT on 1.5-litre models. It’s fast and responsive, with quick downshifts on acceleration and smooth upshifts during normal driving. A sport mode delays upshifts to extract more power, albeit at the expense of fuel economy, of course.

The 2.0 is torquey enough, with a wide enough torque band, that you don’t get what can be too common with big-gear transmissions mounted to tiny engines. There’s no hunting and no delays on downshifts.

It’s controlled by the same push-button/pull button control panel as on some Acura models. It takes one drive to get used to before you’re able to handily activate gears without looking.

Honda has continued its move away from double-wishbone suspensions — a move decried by critics at the time given the excellent handling of previous Honda double-wishbone systems. But in its place is a MacPherson strut front and multi-link rear, and the combination works very well.

The handling is crisp and steering precise. As is now becoming common, electric power steering no longer feels like playing a video game. You feel what’s happening at the front wheels.

Inside, the Accord once again listens to a constant parade of complaints about over-reliance on touchscreen technology, but the Accord takes it a step further: You not only get a volume knob, you also get a tuning knob!

Excellent. Especially since the touchscreen doesn’t respond well to gloves. Or at all, actually. If it’s cold and you’re gloved, you can forget about using the touchscreen until you take your glove off. Real convenient at minus 30.

Improvements have also been made to the steering wheel controls. Today’s Accord uses conventional buttons for up/down on volume, not an odd slider system that only sometimes worked. Scrolling through instrument panel options is done with a thumbwheel, and tuning between stations is by buttons. But you can typically only use the wheel controls to tune between programmed stations.

If there is a complaint, it’s minor. When you’re listening to, say, satellite radio and place a phone call, the display doesn’t revert back to the radio display once the phone call is over. That would be a nice touch.

Also, the idea the dash should involve the passenger is misguided. The display screen for the infotainment system is gloriously large, but it means it’s a reach to tune stations or hit buttons on the right side. I miss the days when such systems would be angled toward the driver, creating an almost cockpit feel.

It’s more important to reduce strain on the driver than on the passenger, who would be able to cope quite well with an angled screen.