2016 Honda Civic Test Drive

Shopping for a compact sedan? Begin your search at a Honda dealer. If you get lazy and stop there, don’t worry. You’re good.The all-new 2016 Civic (with Car Dvd Player) has raised the bar to new heights and turned every other car in the segment into an afterthought. It won the North American Car of the Year award, and while that can be a dubious honor (the Saturn Aura and Chrysler PT Cruiser are among the previous winners), in this case it was well-deserved. This Civic is so excellent, I can’t imagine how the marketing folks at the other automakers are going to deal with it. “No, our car isn’t as good as the Civic, but do you really deserve nice things?” In the 44 years that the Civic has existed, none has looked as sharp as this sweet ’16. The low, fastback roofline gives it a sleek, upscale style, and the interior is as premium quality as any other car for the price, which starts at $19,475. It’s also the largest Civic ever, and the most technologically advanced. This may be Honda’s most affordable sedan, but you can get it with all the autonomous safety features the company has in its arsenal, and that includes Acura. It can help steer between the lines, as long as they’re well-marked, and it does that well. It will brake before you hit another car or a wayward pedestrian. If you don’t notice that you’re driving off the road, it intervenes and does its best to keep it from happening. In light of all the above, the adaptive cruise control system and passenger side blind spot camera seem almost mundane. But while all those features make this like no Civic before, it’s what’s under the hood that’s truly different. The standard engine is a new 2.0-liter 4-cylinder with a healthy 158 hp, but the Civic is also available with a 174 hp 1.5-liter 4-cylinder turbo, which means it’s the first turbocharged Honda ever sold in America. What about install an Android Car Gps? There once was an Acura with a turbo, the 2012-2013 RDX, but it was inefficient and unloved, and it was quickly replaced with a naturally-aspirated V6. Turbos have a reputation for delivering excellent fuel economy on paper, but not in actual use. Honda’s naturally-aspirated engines, however, are notorious overachievers. This was on my mind as I set off in a midlevel Civic EX-T, the lowest-priced turbo model at $23,035. The EPA says it gets 42 mpg on the highway. Mated to a shiftless CVT automatic, it has a nice punch when you gun it, especially when in Sport mode, and it fills the otherwise silent cabin with a smooth thrum. After a long ride, with four aboard and mostly above 70 mph, I toggled to the fuel economy display in the digital instrument cluster – a neat, single binnacle, rather than the infuriating double-decker design used in recent Civics – and learned that I had gotten 45 mpg. This was repeated on several more trips. If installing an Android Car Stereo in your car, that would be great!