Just when we thought that the Civic was getting popular in India (it outsells corolla 10 to 1), Honda has launched the Sport version with nothing but sports kit and a exaggerating "Sports" badge. What we badly needed though was the Civic TYPE R.
There are two ways of looking at the fuel crisis , pessimists would buy more economical cars to save money, optimists on the other hand would like to buy the best cars budget can because the cost of crude will always keep increasing and this is the time to enjoy as in the future you may never be able to afford these cars. Better late then never.
What Honda does instead is Launch a sports version because it has sold over 3lakh cars in India. The version has nothing to boast about except side skirts, front and rear bumper addon kits that reduces the already low ground clearance. You are most likely to scrape it off on some kerb, and these are already available for good bargains at the tuner market.
Oh and i forgot to mention the Sports badge. Ford is better in this respect, as Ford mentions that their Fiesta S at least boasts of stiffer suspension and better steering feel. Honda, being such a popular brand in India (and globally) should have at least tweaked the ECU and suspension to give us a better car to drive. Even a 10bhp increase in power output would have been appreciated, not 225bhp that the Type R makes.
Anyways, lets be optimistic about the future but this so called sport civic according to me is a damp squib and one is better off buying a normal Civic for 13.32 lac (OTR) and have a nice kit and alloys of my preference rather than buy a sport version for nearly 1.5lakhs more and get nothing much.
Source - Honda press release
