2014 Honda Cr-v Ex-l on 2040-cars

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The 2016 Honda Civic desperately needs the cool kids

"... I am contagious, I am breaking down ..." Oh, that's the song. The 2016 Honda Civic's launch party was just so achingly cool. Honda showed off its 10th-generation Civic Sedan Wednesday at YouTube Space LA, and livestreamed it for the world to see. I was standing across from a band whose song I knew but name I didn't (turns out it was Night Riots), and near people in knit caps and tattoos cheering them on. Honda is stoked on this epic new Civic, guys. This all sounds like another cynical marketing attempt to capture the attention of people my age. The ones studies suggest hate driving and have no interest in cars, according to old people and their old muscle cars. Last year, Audi released a whole guide on how to sell the A3 to Millennials. We do love our aggressively targeted campaigns. It's like the Civic became what your Aunt Hattie replaced her '93 Achieva with. In fairness, the 2016 Civic has a hell of a lot riding on its more chiseled shoulders. The Civic long had a following among new, young buyers looking for their first new car, who then just kept buying them because they loved them so much. That sort of fell apart with the ninth-generation Civic, a car so removed from its ancestry in terms of feel, looks, and overall spirit. It's like the Honda Civic became what your Aunt Hattie replaced her '93 Achieva with. It's shown in the sales figures. In 2014, the Accord became Honda's car with the most buyers under the age of 35. The HR-V and CR-V SUVs also represent more of what buyers want these days, with rugged looks and available all-wheel drive. It's no cakewalk for the Civic anymore. Clear past the clutter of the band and the fog of the reveal, and the 2016 Civic already looks like it has the things young new-car buyers look for when they go shopping. Show-car styling, the promise of good fuel economy, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, and lots and lots of features. The first of the new Civics Honda showed touts technology, refinement, and content more than the fun-to-drive characteristics. Enthusiasts may not find much comfort in the fact you can only get Honda's new 1.5-liter turbo on models equipped with a CVT, now that the six-speed manual has really been relegated to the base LX. But then you were probably waiting for the forthcoming Si, or next year's hatchback model, or probably the new Type-R. The Civic sedan targets the mainstream, and this time, the mainstream is the under-35 crowd.

2015 Honda CR-V

Predicting the future direction of Honda's compact CR-V would have been difficult based on the Civic-derived model that first arrived on our shores for the 1997 model year. The newcomer, selling alongside the body-on-frame Passport (a hastily rebadged Isuzu Rodeo), was a cute compact crossover with four doors and an awkward curb-side hinged tailgate thanks to its Japanese home-market design. The five-passenger CUV offered generous interior room, but its wheezy 2.0-liter four-cylinder, with an output of just 126 horsepower and 133 pound-feet of torque, required 11.7 seconds to bring the 3,153-pound vehicle to 60 miles per hour. Rear drum brakes didn't help much in the stopping department, but Honda offered safety-minded consumers optional anti-lock brakes on the premium trim.
Nearly two decades after its introduction, the CR-V has matured in spectacular manner. The refreshed 2015 Honda CR-V, now in its fourth generation, is dimensionally within two inches of its ancestor in overall length and nearly identical in height and wheelbase. That consistency of dimension is impressive in this age of size and segment creep, and it stands as a testament to how 'right' Honda engineers got the model's original packaging. Of course, the CR-V hasn't stood still - nearly everything else about the best-selling compact CUV has improved in leaps and bounds.
But Honda is not the only player in this hotly contested segment today, so the automaker has taken the unusual step of updating its fourth-generation model just a few years after its introduction in an effort to keep it seated on the podium. To learn more about the automaker's improvements, and form our own impressions, we spent a day driving the CR-V in sunny Southern California.

Honda overhauls North American operations with eye towards more autonomy

The increasing sales success of Honda North America (HNA) has led to Honda brass in Japan reorganizing regional operations here. The management shuffling here and in Japan is intended to both streamline and confer more responsibility on HNA "as the region assumes a larger role in shaping Honda's global business," and as Honda builds more facilities that serve several roles in the product development pipeline.
Honda's executive vice president and president of HNA Tetsuo Iwamura was named COO of automotive operations, taking over a position that had been handled by company president Takanobu Ito. Iwamura's new role puts him in charge of anything Honda makes that has four wheels, which Automotive News says equates to 78 percent of the company's global revenue.
The current company CFO, Fumihiko Ike, will fill the now-vacant role of company chairman and Kohei Takeuchi will take his place. Takeuchi is presently the operating officer, general manager of the accounting division. The executive swaps take effect April 1, 2013.