I've said before that the current Honda Civic, which arrived in the UK just under two years ago, is a much better car than its immediate predecessor, despite looking very similar to the untrained eye.
That's one reason why I was happy to learn that the spirits had decreed I should have one to test over the Christmas and New Year period. Among other things, the Civic is a reasonably handsome and certainly distinctive-looking car (the front end being not quite as alarming in real life, I think, as it appears to be in photos).
The instrument layout is, for me, one of the best in the industry. Dials and digital displays are dotted around all over the place - dead ahead of the steering wheel, and in the centre of the dashboard and the part of it immediately in front of the driver - and I can see every one of them without obstruction.
Some re-thinking might be applied to the trip computer. It's a heck of a job changing the display from, say, miles covered to average mpg, and although an owner would get used to this in time I'd prefer a simpler system.
The Civic is roomy, with a class-competitive if not outstanding amount of space for rear passengers and a luggage volume of 477 litres with the rear seats in place - among manufacturers of small family hatchbacks, only Skoda can beat that. And the Civic is very nice to drive, though I won't go into details about that just yet because the are other issues to cover first.
The only thing I really don't like about the Civic is the rear visibility issue. Regular readers will know that I take every opportunity to complain about this, but the situation in this particular case is just ridiculous. Other manufacturers seem to make reversing difficult and dangerous either through ignorance or through carelessness. With Honda, actual aggression seems to be involved, as if the designers are trying their best to make parking unbearable. If the test car hadn't had a reversing camera, I don't think I would have dared to reverse it at all.
Be that as it may, the other reason for looking forward to an unusually long period with this particular Civic was that it had the new 1.6-litre i-DTEC turbo diesel engine. Having spent a very long time refusing to have anything to do with diesels, Honda has done a very good job with this one.
Its maximum power output is 118bhp, and it can produce 84bhp at just 2000rpm. In a car of this size, that's enough to give decent performance, make most overtaking manoeuvres quite simple and generally make the Civic feel quite relaxed.
In addition, the 1.6 diesel emits just 94g/km on the EU cycle, comfortably below the threshold of Vehicle Excise Duty. The combination of this feature and those mentioned in the paragraph above is, I think, rather impressive.
Mind you, on the same EU test this Civic uses diesel at the rate of 78.5mpg. Lovely if you can manage it, but you'd have to work very hard. Something between 55 and 60mpg is much more likely, and in my experience that's only about 10mpg better than you can get from the 1.8-litre petrol version. Which is £1210 cheaper. And uses less expensive fuel.
Okay, the 1.8 also costs £140 a year to tax, and the i-DTEC costs nothing. But as a private buyer I'd have to know I was going to do an awful lot of miles before I would consider the diesel car over the petrol.
But I still like the diesel, and not just for the reasons mentioned so far. Remember I said that the Civic is very nice to drive? Well, the heavier diesel engine affects the ride very slightly - firmer damping would sort that out - but it's still comfortable even on twisty roads with less than perfect surfaces. And the steering is lovely.
So this might not be my first choice of Civic, but I wouldn't mind owning one - all the more so if Honda gave the suspension the mildest of tweaks and fundamentally re-thought its policy on rear window design.
