Honda Civic
When it comes to family car legends, the Civic is right at the top. No one ever made a mistake buying a Civic. After all, it is never going to break down. The downside has been dullness, but that has always been a small price to pay. However, the Civic became rather less civilised in 2006 when the designers funked up the styling with radical creases and triangular exhaust pipes. The Type R went to another level of fun, too. We believe a model like the SR represents the middle ground between some excitement and family practicality.
Less than a decade on, the Mk9 Civic looks almost conventional again, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it is anything other than extraordinarily good. Autocar readers certainly agree and are tremendously loyal to it. Several seriously suggested that whichever generation you went back to, it would still be a contender today. Maybe they have a point, but effectively what they are saying is that old Hondas don’t break down and, on that basis, it deserves to be here. We’d also argue that it should be here on its very considerable merits.
Let’s highlight the boring stuff first and that’s the interior space. There’s absolutely litres of it for luggage. In all, there is more than 400 litres of space, which means nothing. An averagely large suitcase takes 45 litres, and if you fold the rear seats, there’s almost space for 30 of those. Not only that, this is a flat load space and there are almost a couple of suitcases of underf loor storage as well. That makes it a big old hatch.
The Civic is also a usefully economical hatchback with an almost understandable range of engines. There are just a couple of petrols, a 1.4 and 1.8, plus a 1.6 diesel, although just to confuse matters there was also a 2.2 diesel. For argument’s sake, we settled on a 1.6 in SR trim as the model we’d buy because the stats claim average fuel economy is not too far shy of 80mpg. Add the SR ingredients of leather, alloy pedals and heated front seats to name just a few details, and here is a combination that should be easy to live with and resell later. A Type R remains the performance hatch you always promised yourself, but pay less and achieve more by putting a great-value cooking Civic in your life.
No one ever made a mistake buying a Civic. After all, it’ll never break down