Everytime I read about a honda civic, I get this stupid song stuck in my head!
Good cars, from all I can tell. Never heard anything bad about them, and for the price point, quite good quality.
Not as boring as, say, Sentras or Corollas, either, which is a plus.
The new Civic hatchback looks way different from the old ones, too. I like the restyling, although some folks are not fans. It looks very Japanese.
It’s definitely a departure from my old Jetta, but i like how it doesn’t look like a melted jelly bean, like lots of cars.
The old Jetta had a hell of a run though. Had it for 17 years, and the total maintenance I put into it, aside from a set of tires and oil, was less than $1000.
Let me change that for you. :-)
I sold mine after one year to buy the GTI. It is a great car for the money, for instance the EX has stardard features, like climate control, that my GTI doesn’t. But I had to bring it the dealer multiple times in the first year because the door lock sensors stopped working and the tire pressure light refused to reset. Part of my issue was a really bad dealer though, which required multiple trips for each issue.
It is a fine car, I just never really feel in love with the car though. It felt cheap, everything is plastic, the center console is horrible, and I thought my old Golf TDI was a better drive. It was financially stupid to sell it after a year, but I absolutely love my GTI, 3 months later I still just go out on weekends just to drive, I never did that with my Civic, even when it was brand new. Of course the GTI is almost $10k more.
I like the look of the new Civic except…
It’s where the bees live.
Yeah, the GTI was the other car in the running.
The GTI drove better in terms of performance, but ultimately lacked a bunch of other features that i decided it wanted. Adaptive cruise control was definitely one of them, which you needed to go up to the top tier Autobahn edition of the GTI to get… Also, the GTI had no option for remote starting, and getting a 3rd party starter apparently voided the warranty?
It ended up coming down to weighing raw performance against convenience and comfort, and I went with the latter… Mainly because i would use the adaptive cruise control on every highway drive, while the extra horsepower would rarely get fully used.
The Civic has enough power to go fast with it’s 1.5T, and it handles very nicely.
Heh, I’ve never owned a Honda. My wife had a CR-V for 12 years, and while I loathe SUVs, that car was bullet proof. But I guess any brand/model can have its downside.
I’ve had three Golfs/Rabbits, and two have been amazing. One was a mix of great fun and terrible manufacturing (a 1979 version though). What I’ve learned over 40 years of car ownership is that every vehicle, of every brand, has some turkeys in the line up and there’s nothing that everyone loves.
No matter what you look at you’ll find someone loving it, someone hating it, and everything in between I guess!
Personally I’m quite favorable to Honda, my Insight has 86k miles and has been a great car for me. So I hope the best for your new Civic!
Which trim level did you get? I wanted the Sport (The Touring Sport wasn’t out when I bought and I couldn’t wait), but the Sport has the smaller center display so was not an option (and I don’t think it has the Apple/Android options). And which color? Starting to see a lot of the hatchbacks and have my favorites. I usually don’t like white, but I saw a white one with tinted windows and it looked amazing with the blacked out wheels.
I would love to try an Si or Type R. Wonder how they compare to a GTI?
Depends on what you want, I guess. The Hondas tend to have better handling, as measured in skidpad tests, and better overall balance, but the Si lacks power and you can’t get upscale trim levels in it. The Type R is a beast, no doubt about it. It is the best FWD performance car out there, bar none, but it has styling only a 14 year old Otaku could love. If you can find one at MSRP (around $36K) it’s a hell of a good buy, if you can live with the looks. The Golf GTI gets you, in Autobahn trim at least, near-Audi levels of interior quality and damn fine performance, while the Type R gets you race track ready performance but with boy-racer trimmings.
Can’t go wrong with any of them, I’d say.l Different approaches.
When I replace my Golf R, right now I’m thinking Audi TT/TTS or BMW M240i xDrive as the front runners; I need small, fast, and high-end, and there isn’t much in the non-RWD realm that works for me. I am done I think with hot hatches and fast economy car variants. I’m at that point in life where, damn it, I don’t have kids and I want something small, fast, and luxurious.
I got a black sport touring hatchback.
Oddly, to get leather seats, you had to go up to the model that had the useless navigation system. But at least has a nice screen too show Android auto.
Seriously, why do cars have navigation systems? This kind of stuff should be handled entirely by our phones at this point.
I would MUCH rather have nav in the car itself than on a phone. But if you could just have your phone do it and display it on screen that would be fine. Screwing with your phone while driving is a terrible idea (maybe you just go off voice prompts, but I really like having a visual).
No, you misunderstand.
What you describe in your second sentence is exactly what i mean.
I have Android auto, so i played my phone into the USB port to charge, and then it essentially displays apps on the console screen in the car, with touch controls on that screen. The phone sits down in the console.
I agree, having the screen in the car is key.
What i mean is stupid, is that my new car also has it’s own navigation system. Some garbage system from Garmin. I mean, it’s fine as far as car navigation systems go, but it’s grossly inferior to Google maps, which Android auto lets me please on the screen.
Ok, that’s cool. We don’t have a car with that capability yet. The major downside, aside from cost, to having it native to the car is that the maps become out of date.
For a lot of people, still, depending on the vehicle’s niche, smartphone apps are not their go-to thing. They are just getting used to digital navigation vice Rand McNally. And the best systems are pretty solid, though I agree the drawbacks like updates and interface and integration problems compared to Android Auto/Car Play pretty much outweigh the benefits for many of us.
My car has Android Auto, but no nav system. I rarely use Android Auto but it’s nice to have. What bugs the hell out of me is that you can almost never get the upgraded sound system or the upgraded overall car instrumentation (digital dash, whatever) without getting the crappy navigation system. That, indeed, is icky.
This is exactly the situation I was in.
In order to get leather seats, upgraded sound, all the other nice interior stuff… you HAD to get the navigation system.
I mean, I guess it doesn’t matter much, since it’s just an application. So I guess it ultimately doesn’t matter. What’s funny is that the console is literally running android itself.
I kind of wish that the android auto stuff was a bit more fleshed out though. For instance, I’d prefer if android auto worked wirelessly. For long trips, I’m always gonna tether it anyway, to charge it, but it’d be nice if the android auto stuff popped up whenever the phone connected via bluetooth.
I wonder if I could just root the android installed in the console and replace it with something better, since the built-in honda stuff is kind of lame in terms of how its skinned. Also, the fact that you can install apps, but not via wifi (even though it totally has the ability to connect to wifi networks), and instead have to put APKs onto a flash drive.
edit:
Looks like it can be done fairly easily.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/general/guide-how-to-enter-developer-mode-2017-t3621582
My phone automagically pops up Android Auto when I am in the car, but of course it won’t connect to the display, etc. without the USB cable. For my short trips around town, though, I don’t bother plugging it in either.
Car “infotainment” systems, which fogeys like me still call “car stereos” or even “radios,” long ago went from something you could confidently upgraded after market (and avoid paying the premium demanded by the manufacturers for their often inferior “deluxe” sound systems), to a hyper-complex suite of component and software tightly integrated with everything electronic in the vehicle. In my car, all of the electronics, as I understand it, are hooked into the CAN bus and hence you can display all sorts of stuff on both the main touch screen and the driver console MFI. One side effect, of course, is that you can no longer just swap in a new head unit, at least, not at all easily or seamlessly. Add in the Bluetooth stuff and the microphones and all, plus the odd ways different vehicles wire up speakers and the like, and unless you want to pay a custom installer a ton of money (or are in effect an electrical engineer yourself), you can forget about just going to Best Buy and getting a cool stereo to swap out for that base unit you saved a few bucks on. This of course is why the manufacturers went this route, or at least, one reason. Not only can they get you to pay the mark-up on their -branded system, but they can get you to buy the nav and the velour-covered USB port flap in order to get it.
It definitely looks like i can essentially root the software and do stuff on it.
At some point I’m going to brick my car.
I’m sure you won’t be the last…