Honda Civic
REPORT 3
£32,995 OTR/£33,820 as tested/£410 pcm
WHY IT’S HERE
Maybe the best family hatch – just as everyone stops buying hatches
DRIVER
Vijay Pattni
THE HONDA CIVIC eHEV IS ANNOYING. AROUND 90 MILES INTO A 250mile journey up to the Lake District it begins to rain Barring the odd maniac who uses the grubby weather as an excuse to deploy more of their excessively powered car’s excessive power yes don’t say it we know the rest of the motorway instinctively slows down
Grubby’s the right word It’s the sort of rain that smears rather than runs and we slow increasingly in the Honda because the wipers are having a hard time clearing the sludge from the windscreen It gets harder to see Fortuitously a service station beckons so we make a quick pitstop to a refresh the dire state of our sweet inventory and b top up the washer fluid
We pull up to an empty space The bonnet is popped Anticipation builds And then I am entirely flummoxed I think I know my way round an engine bay having buried myself in many old ones attempting to fix various mechanical ailments over the years but for the life of me I cannot find the washer fluid reservoir
A full five minutes passes which is longer than it sounds when you have a increasingly darkening skies above and b an increasingly whiny golden retriever who now needs to be let out for another investigation of the car park
Finally something catches my eye There’s a small blue cap poking surreptitiously from the also blue front wing Relief swells we reinsert the retriever buy more sweets just in case and are off again So why annoying then? Because on a mile drive that’s the only complaint and when the only complaint is “I’m too stupid to find the washer fluid reservoir” it’s amplified