Used Honda Civic Review

• by: Carl
• 7 months ago

Had my 2024 Civic e:hev hybrid almost a year now. Beautiful car with so much that is good in its design; the styling, the handling (drives like it’s on rails), the suspension (excellent compromise between handling and comfort), the sound system, the pin-sharp and informative driver’s display, it has five years’ satnav updates included, and the controls interface ie the things you want to access quickly are on mechanical knobs rather than buried in a touch screen menu.

However, it has two, arguably three serious issues that make me regret buying it.

1. The ‘driver assist’ features which are anything but that. The RDMS (road departure mitigation system) is DANGEROUS. The front camera decides that you are drifting into the verge (when you are not) and pulls the wheel to the right, into the oncoming traffic. On smaller roads this happens a lot. Happened on an A road as well when I was near the crown of the road and the car almost knocked a cyclist over who was coming towards me on the other side of the road. This drove me to finding out how to turn it off, which you can with several scrolling actions and button presses, but it defaults to ‘On’ the next time you power up. Similarly with the LKAS (lane keep assist). The manual says the wheel should vibrate as a warning (as it does on a Ford) but no, it drags the steering back into the lane you’re in.

2. This is the deal-breaker. Sticky steering. After about 3000 miles or more the steering ‘sticks’ when going above 50mph. It feels dead and requires force to move it. Consequently you spend all your time overcompensating because you can no longer make micro-adjustments as we all do unconsciously when maintaining a course. Because of this the self-centring doesn’t work so if you turn the wheel into a curve it continues on that path until you manually force it back.

It’s all over the forums with no acknowledgement from Honda UK that it exists. The usual dealer response is ‘You’re the first to complain about this.’ There’s a huge recall in the USA for sticky steering which is a mechanical fix (grease and a weaker spring in the rack) but that may or may not be the cause of the UK model’s issues.
Doesn’t happen all the time, some journeys it’s all OK, others it’s all the time on motorways and A roads ie above 50mph. Since it started happening on my car the fault appears on around 30% of journeys when going above 50mph. Until they sort this I would not recommend this car.

3. Winter use. I am used to Ford cars which have heated front windscreens. I was dismayed by the Honda the first time I had a frosty morning. You have to sit there with the engine running to obtain the heat to defrost and demist the screen. Takes about 7-10 minutes on average – what a waste of petrol – and even worse, it prioritises the passenger side, ie the venting is for a left-hand drive car!

In addition to that, for 5-10 minutes after finally setting off you get a warning ‘chang’ noise and a warning on the display that the front camera is obscured. It isn’t – the camera is swept by the wipers and is perfectly clear. I suspect it’s condensation that has got into the camera housing inside the car which clears eventually. The noise is VERY irritating.

It has already had a recall for the front camera but that didn’t fix any of the issues above.

This is the best and equally the worst car I’ve ever owned. Any manufactured item will have design compromises which you have to take with the whole product, but for me the potentially dangerous driver assist ‘safety’ features which can only be turned off every time the car is started, and the potentially dangerous sticky steering far outweigh this car’s many strengths and I could not recommend it to anyone until Honda admit that these problems exist in the UK model (which is made in Japan) and sort them out.

PS I’m trying to leave this review but the website keeps saying ‘Duplicate comment detected’ so I will try again with the Pros and Cons removed.

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