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| Road Test Honda Jazz 1.4i ES |
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Jazz Fan
I rather liked the old Jazz too. The ride quality was terrible (or "not so good" as Project Leader Kohei Hitomi is willing to describe it) but for a small car it had an astonishing amount of room for passengers and luggage, and that was more important. The new Jazz, introduced to the UK last October, is slightly larger, but that doesn't make the packaging any less impressive. Although very tall drivers might wish for an extra inch or two of seat travel, everyone else is likely to be perfectly happy with the amount of room available up front, and there is so much space even for large adults in the back that you wonder what other manufacturers are playing at when they offer such cramped conditions in similarly-sized cars. Each part of the split-folding rear seat folds down flat within a second of you pulling the relevant lever, without the need to remove the headrests or adjust the position of the front seats. With the rear seats tucked away like this the Jazz offers 883 litres of luggage capacity up to window level - a more than adequate amount in what is basically a taller-than-normal supermini.
When the rear seats are unfolded and ready to carry passengers again the load volume of a Jazz with a 1.2-litre engine is 366 litres. The two 1.4-litre models, including the lower-spec ES tested here, are fitted as standard with what's known as a Double Trunk system. This brings the capacity down to 335 litres, but it also means that the boot floor can be lifted to reveal a further storage compartment which you can use to store some items separately from the others, or simply to increase the amount of available space. This is useful, but the problem is that the extra space has been released by abandoning the spare wheel. Instead, Honda offers a tyre repair kit, which (like all these things) is a fat lot of good if the wheel itself has been damaged or the tyre wrecked beyond salvation. For that reason I think I'd avoid the 1.4 and go for a non-Double Trunk 1.2 if I were considering buying a Jazz. While I'm having a rant (and don't worry - the sun will reappear from behind the clouds shortly) I have to say that I'm feeling cheated by the pictures of the new Jazz which were released several months before it arrived in the UK. Those images suggested that there was a surprisingly sensible amount of glass in the design, but as things have turned out a lot of it is obscured, and visibility is therefore not nearly as good as it should be.
The front quarterlights are okay, in the sense that you can actually see through them, which you can't in several rival products, but the pillars surrounding them are much too large and create awkward blind spots in which you could easily lose a pedestrian, a bike or even another car. The view out of the back is ridiculously bad and makes optimism at least as important an ingredient as observation when you're trying to reverse. The most significant improvement over the old Jazz is that this one is much nicer to drive. The ride is still a little bouncy from time to time, but it's much better than before, and although the modest amount of front-end grip means you might not always drive through a corner on quite the line you intended to (particularly in the wet, where care is definitely needed) this isn't going to be a problem for most Jazz buyers, who presumably don't want or need to get from A to B in a tearing hurry most of the time. Top gear is surprisingly low - it feels very similar to fourth - and this can't help economy on a long motorway journey, but without actually going to the trouble of doing any measurements I didn't feel that the Jazz was using fuel at an unacceptable rate. The relatively high engine speeds during a cruise should have made the car feel noisy and fussy, but in fact the noise suppression is so good that you hardly notice the engine at all. Forgive the exaggeration there: the point is that, for a small car, the Jazz is remarkably quiet.
As mentioned before, the test car's ES specification is the lower of the two with the 1.4-litre engine; there's an EX version costing £1300 more if you want extra kit. The 1.2 models are called S and SE, and apart from the fact that they have proper spare wheels they might be worth considering because they're cheaper to buy and insure, very nearly as powerful, almost as quick and probably a fair bit more economical, even though the official figures don't suggest much of a difference there. Price: £11,860
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