Car & Driver: 2014 Honda Accord Plug-In Hybrid

Accord Hybrid v2.0 plugs in for mpg bragging rights.
May 2013
BY CSABA CSERE PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL SIMARI

TESTED

Two Accord generations ago, Honda offered a hybrid powertrain in its mainstream sedan. But it was a performance-oriented V-6 hybrid that never achieved the lofty fuel-economy numbers that eco buyers crave. Now, Honda is jumping back in the game with a new, efficiency-oriented Accord hybrid, and its mileage is impressive. It’s rated by the EPA at 47 in the city and 46 on the highway. Moreover, it’s a plug-in hybrid, and when operating on electric power, it gets 124 MPGe in the city and 105 on the highway. Its combined rating of 115 MPGe is bested only by Honda’s much smaller Fit EV. 

To achieve this efficiency, the Accord plug-in uses an “Earth Dreams” 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine—which translates to a hybrid-typical Atkinson-cycle engine—coupled to a pair of electric motors, powered by a 6.7 kWh lithium-ion battery. The coupling arrangement is not the Integrated Motor Assist that Honda uses on other hybrids. Instead, it’s more like the Toyota and Ford systems with a 166-hp AC traction motor and a smaller motor generator, connected in such a way that the electric and gasoline power can be seamlessly blended. 

The Accord system is smooth, very efficient, and reasonably peppy, accelerating to 60 mph in 7.7 seconds, and covering the quarter-mile in 16.1 seconds at 88 mph. That makes the Accord the quickest PHEV on the market, now that the Fisker Karma has bitten the dust. 

With a fully charged battery, the EPA rates the Accord’s electric range at 13 miles. We measured 13.7 during an urban/suburban drive at the speed limit plus five mph. In the process, the Accord used 3.6 kWh of electricity, equivalent to 3.85 miles per kWh, an excellent figure. After the gas engine cut in, we averaged 42 mpg on a 500-mile drive from Ann Arbor to Michigan’s West Coast and back.

This efficiency doesn’t come solely from the powertrain. The Accord plug-in gets low rolling-resistance tires, a number of aerodynamic tweaks, and an aluminum hood, front subframe, and rear bumper beam to save a few pounds. Even so, the plug-in weighs 400 pounds more than a similarly equipped EX-L model. 

That additional weight is not terribly obvious, as the Plug-In uses the torque of its electric motor to move away briskly from a stop. Honda has also recalibrated its power steering to help the car feel lighter. Unfortunately, its heft is now too light, to the detriment of on-center feel and general cornering feedback. Grip is also down from the 0.86 g of the last conventional Accord we tested to 0.82, and the suspension feels softer. It rides placidly on smooth pavement, but there’s too much body motion if you start pressing a bit harder on bumpy roads. 

The new electric-servo brake, however, does a better job of blending regenerative braking with friction braking than most electric car brakes. The transmission also offers a B (battery) mode that substantially increases regen when you release the accelerator. In the city it lets you drive with one pedal most of the time, just like a Tesla does, and offers the same kind of lift-pedal deceleration you’d experience in first or second gear in a manual-transmission car. 

Another feature that’s new to the Accord is the LaneWatch blind-spot display, which turns on a camera in the right-side mirror whenever you activate your right turn signal. It brings up a view to the right, including your blind spot, in the main LCD display in the center of the dash.

Inside, the plug-in is much like other Accords, with a good driving position, a logical control layout, and plenty of room. The new, Bio Fabric upholstery looks and feels cheap, even if it’s produced by an environmentally friendly manufacturing process. And the Accord’s trunk gives up nearly half its (previously capacious) volume to the big battery. Outside, the plug-in is recognizable by its rear spoiler, several odd-looking bits of blue-toned brightwork, and tacky-looking aerodynamic wheels that might as well have been ripped from the shelves of Pep Boys. 

Of course, the prime directive of hybrids is to deliver efficiency and this Accord does that in spades. While we might like a bit more than 13 miles of electric range, the plug-in recharges quickly, needing only three hours on a standard 120-volt outlet and less than an hour with Honda’s 220-volt charger. 

All of this technical excellence costs a pretty penny—4,057,000 of them—though you do get a federal tax rebate of $3636, which brings the price down to $36,934. Compared to a well-equipped conventional Accord, which costs about six grand less, if you drive 10,000 in 20-mile chunks, with a full charge between each one, the plug-in will save you about $750. At that rate you will break even after 80,000 miles. That rate of payback will have to improve before the plug-in becomes as mainstream as the rest of its Accord siblings. 

Source;
 http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/2014-honda-accord-plug-in-test-review

Car and Driver Magazine; 2013 Honda Civic EX-L Sedan AT Review

From the May 2013 Issue of Car and Driver 

• April 2013
• BY DANIEL PUND
• PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARC URBANO

For one regrettably long decade, the rolling stock of the midwestern United States consisted of Pontiac Grand Ams and Dodge Shadows. Seriously, the place was filthy with them. This seems to prove what we have long believed: A car’s sales success often has a weak correlation to its greatness. 

And so, we arrive at the 2012 Honda Civic, which was an undeniable sales success for the company. Honda says it sold 331,872 of the then all-new Civics in 2012, making it the bestselling car in its class that year. We presume that most buyers are perfectly satisfied with their purchases. 

And yet, for the long-term health of the model’s and the company’s reputation, Honda has performed a thorough do-over of the Civic for 2013, modifying its look, its interior ambience, its front structure, and its suspension and steering systems. 

With new front and rear styling, Honda grafts a shiny smile to the formerly sad, sluglike shape of the four-door Civic. Honda says it’s a more “emotional” and “youthful” design. This, of course, means nothing. But we like the new look just fine. 

Honda redid the interior as well, giving it a more conventional look and feel, with a black upper dash, a mildly reworked center stack, some shiny trim, and leather-like graining in place of the strange bacteria-in-a-petri-dish look. The ambience is more upscale. That the car also carries more sound-deadening insulation and thicker glass to block noise helps a great deal. Honda did not reduce the number of small information displays that, at four, seems about 50 percent too many. 

With new narrow-offset crash tests looming, Honda beefed up the Civic’s front structure. We did not test the efficacy of this modification. The revised structure adds almost 50 pounds of steel to the front end. That, plus more standard equipment, such as a rearview camera, had our 2013 ­tester weighing in at 2876 pounds, 125 more than the 2012 Civic sedan we tested. The weight gain hasn’t affected the car’s acceleration times, which remain about a second behind the class-leading Ford Focus. Honda hasn’t made any changes to the powertrain, a weak-kneed 140-hp 1.8-liter four and five-speed auto. 

It wasn’t the 2012 Civic’s pokiness that bothered us most, though. It was the soft and numb suspension and steering responses that inspired us to describe it as “alarmingly Lincoln-like.” 

We’re delighted to report Honda has starched the suspension with thicker anti-roll bars (up 0.9 inch in front and 0.2 inch at the rear), stiffer springs (plus 15 percent front, 18 percent rear), and retuned dampers. The effect is almost transformative. The ride is now controlled without being harsh, imparting a distinctly less-cheap feeling. The company also quickened the steering ratio by 8 percent (from 16.1:1 to 14.9:1), which makes the Civic feel like the small, light car it is. Unfortunately, Honda has added zero percent additional feedback to the operation of the steering. 

But the 2013 Civic is 28 percent closer to the car Honda should have built in the first place. Baby steps, you know.

Source;
http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/2013-honda-civic-sedan-test-review 

Car and Driver; 2013 Honda Accord EX-L V-6 Coupe Automatic

Soul Survivor: Honda's shapely and fast two-door goes whistling past the graves of its competition.

• March 2013
• BY AARON ROBINSON
• PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROY RITCHIE

Assumptions fly with the arrival of a driver in a two-door coupe: The driver has no young children. The driver pays others to deliver the new furniture and television sets. The driver does not spend long weekends at the lake, or shop for an orphanage at Costco, or rebuild old Mopars, or venture into rainy nights to walk a malamute. 

Of course, you can own the new Honda Accord coupe while defying all of these assumptions, except maybe the one about the dog. But because people tend to buy cars they believe mesh perfectly with their busy lifestyles, rather than ones that might just do in a pinch, former rivals to the Accord coupe have steadily become stuffed pelts in the museum of automotive evolution. 

The Toyota Camry Solara is gone, as is the Chevy Monte Carlo, and the Nissan Altima coupe is making death rattles. To make comparisons, we had to cast the net widely, from the Ford Mustang to the Volkswagen Beetle Turbo. Proof that it’s been a while since a two-door hardtop was urban chic lies in the increasingly vast flotillas of SUVs, of  jacked-up Benzes and Hyundais shaped like hiking boots. In our auto biosphere, the elephants are winning. 

Thus, what you see here is a survivor, albeit one expertly tailored in the Honda way to serve those with lesser lug-about needs. Whistling past the graves of others, the two-door Accord comes fitted with a four-cylinder or a V-6, and here we sample the latter, oddly equipped with the six-speed automatic. “Oddly,” we say, because a six-speed manual is also available with the 278-hp V-6, and our preference for sticks is well documented. But so is the wider population’s disdain for them, so we have, in this case for the sake of  broader science, deigned to test Honda’s new automatic. 

Choosing the V-6/automatic propels you out of the $20,000s and into the low-$30,000 realm, a sort of Mongolian desert for two doors. The only other kindred soul slogging its way across this barren stretch is the Hyundai Genesis Coupe 3.8. The Mustang V-6 and Beetle Turbo remain back in Mid-20s Town, and in the far distance is an oasis of pedigreed sports coupes such as the Audi A5 and Infiniti G37, which start at or just under $41,000. 

Yet, when it’s all broken down into lease payments, this gussied-up Accord coupe sits a little too close to machines of seriously upscale pretensions to completely discount them as competition. The Honda is tangibly cheaper, but at $33,140 with the $2000 optional navigation system, it has to be the luxurious and dynamic real deal, or potential buyers might stretch to the next rung. 

The coupe’s styling makes a strong start at keeping buyers in the Honda showroom. This is a company that doesn’t follow the crowd in mixing its genres. Whereas the new Accord sedan is something of a revival of flatter-roof, larger-window, more-upright-windshield practicality in a market hastening toward four-door Lotus Esprits, the coupe is definitely a coupe. From an unapologetically three-box profile, the coupe melts down and puddles rearward into a pleasingly sloped wedge. It breaks the air with an upturned bank of narrow headlights fanning out from the grille, and follows through with flexed tendons in the sheetmetal running up the sides to the rear. Black cutouts in the bumpers add a whiff of racy air ducting, but in fact are just blanked-off, design-studio theater. Because the new, smaller Accord heralds the industry’s retreat to more sane dimensions in this class, the robotic-snowflake wheels manage to look big even at just 18 inches.

As with any coupe, the doors are longer and may require foam ­bumpers to be deployed in the garage, but the inner armrests and pockets are at least slimmed down for easier exits. Honda’s cockpit-design ethos has swayed little with the winds of time, remaining primarily dependent on yards of black plastic interstitched with stacked tiers speckled with buttons. One large super-knob, familiar to any driver of a higher-spec Honda or an Acura of the past 10 years, controls the upper information screen. 

What’s new is a second, smaller touch screen below, part of the EX and EX-L trim upgrades, that serves as the virtual radio console. This second screen is where the ergonomics turn silly. Its pixelated station-seeking buttons are a distraction to tap while driving, and the single, free-standing volume knob, while welcome, is needlessly lonely. By fitting a second knob for spin-tuning (the available real estate is ample and rotary car-radio knobs have been a winning design since the 1930s), Honda would have made the radio much easier to use. Note that you can’t buy any V-6 coupe without getting the touch screen.

Also, the Accord’s electronics are gallingly slow considering that its technology is hardly groundbreaking. As you spin and push the Honda’s super-knob to program the nav, the on-screen cursor alternately pauses and then skips wildly as the processor struggles to keep up with your inputs. Entering an address or syncing a Bluetooth phone is an exercise in target shooting. True, you can use the smaller touch screen to enter addresses directly using a virtual keyboard, which is that screen’s only really useful function. But history will record that profit-laden $2000 factory nav systems were killed off by $200 smartphones, and Honda was happy to help. 

With the coupe, Honda shows its strengths in other ways. If rear passengers are in the party, the back seats welcome them with an easy-slide front-seat release and a deep, supportive scalloping to the bench foam. Honda is not known for wasting millimeters, and in the coupe, a six-footer can sit behind a six-footer without a squeeze. The rear seatbacks also fold as one via a release in the trunk, so longer items need not be left at the curb. Aside from the electronics, the only serious design dribble is with the cutout for the door grab handle, which is placed right where the driver’s left elbow wants to perch. 

Honda’s signature red start button lights the 3.5-liter V-6. It rasps with a voice sharpened to penetrate the cabin. Note the elevated sound levels in the specs, especially the 83-dBA full-throttle reading. Not that we’re complaining. Stand on it, and this Honda sounds like a Honda, built around a precision engine with its power in the penthouse and one brisk elevator going up. 

It attains the 60-mph mark in a snappy 5.5 seconds. Nothing over five seconds is stunning these days, but it puts the coupe nearly even with a G37 and it whomps the Genesis and Audi A5 2.0T. The all-season Michelins mean that other performance indexes, such as the 0.86-g skidpad and the 169-foot braking, are less noteworthy and more aligned with the coupe’s genetic lineage. 

On the road, however, the Accord coupe feels as tightly wound as a sapper poking a land mine. The throttle is on a short fuse and the transmission is always primed and ready. It doesn’t wait to see if you’re serious before kicking down a couple of ratios. The light-but-tense steering responds right now, with a no-nonsense alertness. Slight tugs of wheel feedback hint at the hard work being done by the tires. The brakes have a deep reserve of capability and enough shading in their operation to set up a corner perfectly. Here is yet another Honda that proves front-drive cars can handle. 

Parts of this highly caffeinated coupe are a little too amped for the car’s own good, though. The suspension is just plain harsh, causing obnoxious head-toss where it should just be lightly thumping and bumping. And the transmission sometimes feels too eager, too rough, banging home the next gear unnecessarily or throwing a ragged downshift at you when you’re just coasting up to a light. 

It’s a strange machine, then, and hard to pigeonhole. Closer to its $24,140 four-cylinder-equipped base price, it makes more sense as a larger, steadfastly adult alternative to the Scion FR-S and similar. But at this price, its elegant but utilitarian interior and the tattle-tale squirm of the disproportionately heavy front end under acceleration never let you forget that it’s just the market’s best mainstream family taxi minus two doors. But it is also fast and edgy, at times a can of Red Bull on radials. It generates the performance stats of more-expensive cars, but without the brand cachet or the credibility of rear-wheel drive, a fact that will undoubtedly send some potential buyers walking. 

It is, in short, a car that defies assumptions even as it defies extinction.
Source;
http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/2013-honda-accord-ex-l-v-6-coupe-automatic-test-review-just-the-markets-best-mainstream-family-taxi-minus-two-doors-page-2