Hunting the great red shark

Great car, pity about the transmission and the sticker shock.

HUNTER S Thompson once drove a car he called the Great Red Shark through the desert. And over the December holidays, so did I. Except mine wasn’t a Chevrolet convertible but a shiny new Honda Civic 1.5T Executive.

There were other differences too. Thompson’s trunk was filled with, among other things, two bags of dagga, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of highpowered blotter acid and a salt-shaker half-full of cocaine. There was apparently also a quart of tequila and a case of beer.

I had no such provisions. Partly due to the fact that I’m cleanliving and partly because most of the car had been filled with my mountain bike. Indeed, the Civic looks capacious but in practice space is strangely lacking — even with the rear seats folded. Probably due to the steeply raked roofline that is responsible for this machine’s dapper profile.

So as I crammed my suitcase between the passenger seat cushion and the cubbyhole, I wondered if I would not have been better off picking the new Honda BR-V as my holiday steed.

As soon as I hit the N1 highway, however, and merged into the crimson-neon trail of taillights, my doubts evaporated. For down this road tarred with vacation reveries the new Civic is a delight. Honda has finally fitted it with a powertrain of the 21st century. In the past the Civic made do with frugal but generally anaemic naturally aspirated motors. Every time it came to overtaking a 40m

An excellent car that I’m betting few people will consider

pantechnicon, you’d have to drop three gears, squint into the heat haze and pray that your spatial judgment was on point. If not you would die.

Well, not any more. Now you have a turbo and enough wallop to fling you past dawdlers without worry of becoming another Arrive Alive statistic.

It’s a revelation all right. What isn’t a revelation is the gearbox to which it comes wedded. Climbing into a car and discovering it has a continuously variable transmission is like going on a Tinder date and discovering that the girl hasn’t been honest with her profile picture — you feel cheated. OK, down a long, straight road at constant speeds a CVT is not necessarily a bad thing. But when you stumble across a nice piece of bendy asphalt spaghetti, like the R318 that winds its way from the N1 to Montagu, the dynamic limitations of this droning, belt-driven swine become apparent.

Especially in a car like the Civic that is genuinely nice to drive. Honda say they polished the chassis to make the new car feel more playful. Weight was burnt, reflexes sharpened. I’m always wary of this marketing bumf but in this instance you can feel a difference. It’s at the top of its class when it comes to handling.

Yet the biggest congratulatory slow-clap is reserved for the interior — the instrument cluster in particular. Up until now every Honda Civic I’ve driven has been cursed with a stupid two-tier dashboard layout. You had your rev-counter, fuel and temperature gauge on the lower level and the digital speedometer on the top level. Sounds plausible, right?

Sure, if you’re a midget. However if you’re tall like me then your seating position will be such that the steering wheel obstructs the speedometer. “Sir, do you know how fast you were going back there?” “Why no, officer, I honestly have no idea.”

This time around everything is in one neat and logical place. So there’s no contorting required to keep tabs on your velocity. Still, this didn’t stop me from being flagged down by a policeman on the outskirts of Bloemfontein: his moustache quivering as he silently filled out a form that I hope got lost in the post.

There was more to like inside the cabin. Two USB ports. Heated leather seats. Adaptive cruise control. A touchscreen infotainment system with Bluetooth and Apple CarPlay. There was even a blind-spot camera.

The more I drove this Honda the more I liked it. And I drove it a lot. The Civic has a lot going for it, and is bloody economical too. I averaged 6.5l/100km over 3 600km of mixed conditions.

Unfortunately, there is a catch — the price. At R40k shy of the R500 000 mark, the Civic 1.5T Executive is playing in entry-level BMW 3 Series and Audi A4 territory. Now these Germans won’t be as lavishly equipped but they will have the edge over things like interior quality and brand cachet. And there’s nothing the average South African buyer wants more than brand cachet. Which is something the Honda badge simply does not have.

So what we have here is an excellent car that I’m betting few people will consider. On the flipside this should see the new turbocharged Civic become a fine second-hand buy. Wait a few months and you’ll probably find my Great Red Shark — or lowmileage demos like it — advertised for less than R400k. And at that price it then makes sense to pull the trigger.

Trust me, you’ll be somewhere around Colesberg on the edge of the Karoo when that good-deal smile starts to spread across your face . . .