| Launch Report Honda Civic IMA |
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Extraordinarily Normal That tends to be the last thing marketing people want you to say about their products, but the chap had a point. And the point was that he really didn't want the IMA to be called a hybrid, even though it has two power sources - a petrol engine and an electric motor which gets its power from a nickel metal hydride battery pack. Nervousness about the H word is understandable. Honda's last attempt at a mainstream hybrid, the Insight, was very clever but looked weird and didn't sell in significant numbers. The IMA looks absolutely bog standard. It's just a four-door Civic with SE Executive trim, and you'd have to look very closely to find anything about it that differs from the non-IMA versions. There's nothing unusual about the engine. It's a 1.3-litre unit which is not actually fitted to any other Civic but is standard issue in the smaller Honda Jazz. Between the engine and the gearbox lies the electric motor, which gives the drivetrain an extra heave as necessary and, Honda claims, gives the IMA the combined benefits of the performance of a 1.6 and the fuel economy of a 1.1. But Does It? This is worth investigating. An hour's drive on a wide variety of roads suggests that the IMA performs only about as well as a fairly moderate 1.6. Acceleration isn't bad, but nothing special, until you remember that there's actually only a 1.3 under the bonnet. With that in mind, the IMA is indeed quite a bit more rapid than you might expect. The electric motor clearly has a large effect. Economy? Well, official figures suggest 65.7mpg extra urban and 57.6mpg combined. This would be impressive stuff even for a smaller petrol engine in a much lighter car, though a similarly-sized diesel would not find the numbers difficult to match. Significantly enough, the diesel version of the Civic has a very similar combined figure of 56.5mpg.
Fuel usage isn't entirely determined by the IMA system. The economy is helped - and the performance hindered - by the fact that the car is sensationally high-geared, quite contrary to Honda's usual practice. That should be a help on long motorway journeys, when the engine is just puttering along at very low revs, but it also means that on country roads and in towns you have to select one gear lower than normal to make any kind of progress at all. If you do this you release more performance potential than was at first apparent, but you also get through a lot more fuel. Behind The Wheel Driving the IMA is, as the man said, a "normal" experience. Once you've got used to the extra instruments, including the one which tells you whether the battery pack is being discharged (during acceleration, for example) or charged (during braking or coasting), you quickly feel that you are sitting in an ordinary, though rather high-spec, Civic. The handling is a little out of the ordinary. The IMA feels a little like a diesel to drive, and for the same reason; there's more weight under the bonnet - caused in this case by the electric motor - and therefore more work for the front suspension to do. But Honda did a decent job of making the diesel handle well, and the IMA isn't bad either. Apart from all that, the only sign of electronic trickery during normal motoring is that the engine will cut out when the car stops (unless the air-conditioning is switched on, in which case the engine keeps running to stop the battery going into hysterics). When the lights change to green, a prod of the throttle brings it back to life immediately. Typical Civic qualities such as excellent build quality and amazing rear passenger space are unaffected. So, strangely enough, is luggage room. The battery pack is behind the rear seat, and although it would have eaten into the load area of a hatchback Civic, it doesn't in this case. Which, of course, is exactly why the four-door body was chosen. The Financial Question On sale today, the IMA costs £14,995 on the road, but it's eligible for a £1000 Powershift subsidy. It's also exempt from the London congestion charge. Insurance is Group 9, and Honda quotes industry watcher CAP Monitor's opinion that the IMA will have a slightly better residual value than the petrol hatchback version. Honda reckons that the electronic trickery will not require expensive servicing or repair costs, and has backed this up by offering an eight-year/100,000-mile warranty on the IMA system, including the battery pack. Warranty on the mechanical parts of the car is Honda's usual three years/90,000 miles. The fact that IMA is available only on one very specific model shows that this is a toe-in-the-water exercise, though a more confident one than the Civic was. But there's no immediately reason why it can't be applied to other cars, and in a few years we may find that all Civics - perhaps all Hondas - are available with three engine options: petrol, diesel and IMA. Customer demand will no doubt decide the issue. |
It was, I think, an unprecedented event. As we stood discussing the Civic IMA I was about to drive, the Honda marketing man insisted that the word he most wanted to be used to describe the car was "normal"..gif)
