Why I bought a 5th-gen Honda City petrol CVT: Detailed ownership review

The sedan replaced our 10-year-old Volkswagen Polo.

BHPian sankdadevil recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

This is an ownership thread that I intend to maintain over the coming years on my ownership of Honda City (5th Gen) Petrol ZX CVT.

Likes & Dislikes

The customary list of likes & dislikes based on our test drive in late January 2022 followed by approx. 4 weeks (~350 KMs) of ownership so far.

Likes:

• Feeling of a premium sedan - comfort, looks, luxury - the rear bench is heavenly
• Appreciable ride quality - smooths out the pothole-riddled roads
• Truly key-less entry and exit - configurable via the settings
• Sporty engine note and exhilaration on revving beyond 5K RPM - rev-happy engine
• Paddle shifters - for that quick downshift while going over a ghat or attempting an overtake - in both the "S" model as well as the "D" mode
• The "S" mode unleashes the beast to deliver the sportiness expected from this gem of a 1.5L Naturally Aspirated i-VTEC engine
• ORVM allows a peek of the road from between the A-pillar and the mirror mounting point - reduces the blind-spot created by A-pillar
• 3 point seat belt for all occupants - even for the rear centre passenger
• 6 Airbags
• Physical climate control knobs with a click on each turn - no need to fumble while driving
• Hit the power button on the infotainment system and it will be muted - handy to quickly silence the cabin while reversing or attending an incoming call
• 8 speaker setup (on ZX) is fulfilling - needs to be tuned to your liking from the settings - works best with the connected phone not so much with radio
• All four windows as well as the sun-roof have pinch-guard
• All four windows as well as the sun-roof have a one-touch operation (on ZX)
• All four windows, as well as the sun-roof, can be opened using the key remotely
• No under-body scraping yet (in ~4 weeks of ownership)
• Approx. 5L of reserve even when fuel tank level shows 0
• Honda Connect App works as advertised, also maintains an automatic log of each trip with Distance, Avg. Speed and Trip Duration

Dislikes:

• Presence of hard plastics on the interiors
• Stock tyres are under-sized - had to upgrade it as soon as the car moved out of the showroom
• IRVM is a size smaller for my liking
• Boring mid-range rev
• No electric/assisted seat adjustments
• No memory for seat adjustments
• No passenger side seat adjustments
• No cooled/ventilated seats
• If the car is parked outside on a sunny afternoon the air conditioning can feel inadequate to the rear passengers
• The sound insulation can be better - road noises do seep in, better than hatchbacks not so much when compared to premium sedans
• No 360-degree camera feed!
• The camera feeds (both lane change camera as well as a reverse camera) is quite dated (feels like last decade) - Honda seriously needs to consider higher-resolution cameras with better low light performance
• The infotainment system looks dated - competition provides larger, more vibrant, higher-resolution displays for their infotainment system
• With the sun-roof open on a sunny afternoon, the visibility of the infotainment screen seems poor
• Slotting the transmission to "R" does not automatically mute/reduce the volume of the infotainment system - our Polo had this nifty feature
• TPMS is more of a mathematical formula to determine deflation of a tyre and not really a pressure monitoring system
• The front over-hang scraped twice in a period of ~4 weeks
• The front centre armrest doesn't slide - can be an inconvenience
• Trip 1 doesn't reset to 0 automatically after a certain period of no use i.e. I need to remember to reset Trip 1 before every journey - our Polo used to reset Trip A after two hours of being parked and it helped to check the trip stats. Honda Connect
• App maintains a trip log automatically for each journey and I now rely on the app more than the MID.
• The fuel efficiency on various runs has ranged from 10-12 KMPL as per the MID. The fuel tank has not been refilled since the first tank was full on the day of delivery.

RedPo - Previous Ride

We brought home a VW Polo 1.2 MPI (Highline) in October 2012. It has since proven to be an impeccable and trustworthy ride. We always counted on it to get us to wherever we wanted without a scratch and it delivered flawlessly. Our ownership experience was much more of a relationship where we looked after each other. In the words of GTO “It (Polo) was to hatchbacks what the 1st-gen City Vtec was to sedans."

An expanding family and need for more creature comforts meant there was a need for an upgrade. We started looking out for probable contenders in 2019 and were strongly inclined to go for either a Honda Civic or Honda City and during the same time the news of an impending upgrade to the Honda City lineup started doing the rounds. We were comfortable parking the decision till 2020. As the world was upended by the pandemic in 2020 the car upgrade took a backseat. We cannot thank our RedPo enough for all the services it rendered during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. The inter-state travels were a breeze and we felt safe and comfortable at high-speed highway travels. No unnerving experiences with this ownership. We parted ways just a couple of days prior to our new vehicle delivery.

On a side note, our love & admiration for Polo has been so strong that when the 1.2 TSI with 7-speed DSG was launched, we bought one for our hometown. This ownership still continues… Moreover, based on our feedback a lot of our friends & family members opted to bring home one or the other model of VW Polo.

To be or not to be an SUV owner

The last 5 years or so saw a lot of SUVs being launched in India and every person around was bringing home one of the so-called SUVs (essentially a Compact SUV a.k.a. CSUV.) The share of sedans in the overall market share was showing a steep and steady decline. We also thought of giving the SUV space a look.

My only fixation was to have at least an AWD or ideally a proper 4x4. Having a two-wheel driven vehicle badged as an SUV is just a marketing gimmick for which I was not inclined to shell out a steep premium. The consensus of having a higher ground clearance didn’t make too much sense to me as the ground clearance needs a more holistic look by taking into consideration the suspensions, wheelbase, tyre profile, etc… My thought is, if ground clearance is so much of an issue, how have a collective lot of an entire nation travelled the length and breadth of this great nation without SUVs for so long!?! Various threads on this forum helped me realize that my thoughts were in the right direction.

SUVs serve an objective, a specific desire of venturing into areas where there is no road or has treacherous (snowy/sandy/boggy) roads and to achieve this objective it needs proper tech i.e. 4x4. I was wondering how the various offerings in the less than 30 lakh price bracket could offer such tech. The marketers have really caught the fancy of the population and are rolling out a lot of Compact SUVs that run on two wheels but are advertised as badass and what-not! No offence to any owners of such vehicles. These are fine vehicles in their own right and are really desirable. Moreover, it’s a pleasure to see a new form factor catching the imagination of an entire nation (and even globally.) Vehicles on our roads today have a lot of variety and it’s definitely a welcome thing.

A few worthy contenders that were considered, are the Jeep Compass Limited in its 4x4 avatar and the XUV 700 in its AWD avatar. I will not go into the pros and cons of each as these are very well articulated in their respective official reviews as well as by various forum members.

I was not very well convinced with the presence of Jeep w.r.t. service & support. Also, being a relatively new and mostly one car offering in India, a Jeep’s long-term ease of ownership was unknown. The wait for XUV 700 (approx. 15 months when I checked) was excruciatingly long and given that we originally started looking out for a new car in 2019 it was just endless… and coupled with frequent price bumps it was not a worthy bet. Moreover, both these options were touching or exceeding the 30 lakh mark. After some fair discussions, it was decided to put off both of these options.

The dream of owning a Civic in India

I learnt to drive on a Honda Civic and have spent many years enjoying its marvellous engineering. With time our family switched to Honda Accord, another magnificent piece of automotive engineering within the reach of regular people. These ownerships were outside of India. However, the brand Honda and its promise of good-ol' trust-worthy Japanese engineering never left my imagination.

When the Civic was re-launched in 2019 in India, I was really upbeat to get one home. However, its reception in the market was lukewarm and rightly so. I hoped that Honda would come up with a face-lift, a new variant, something to put life in this beauty that once held the entire world enthralled by its magnificence. Alas, Honda decided to pull the plug on Civic and it went off-stage!

A contender from VW stable

We did briefly glance at VW Taigun given our previous ride from VW stable served us so well. However, we decided against it due to the lack of an AWD option and the long-term reliability of DSG. The Polo DSG back at our hometown did give us a shocker a few months back! As it has been rightly claimed on this forum time and again “it’s not a question of if but when will the DSG give up.” Moreover, we were not as impressed with its styling as compared to the timeless styling of the Polo.

Continue reading BHPian sankdadevil ownership review for more insights and information.