2012 Honda Civic Hybrid Review | 2012 Honda Civic Hybrid Price, Features and Complete Review

The great: The 2012 Civic Hybrid is currently the most fuel-efficient Honda on the market. The new I-MID puts navigation, trip computer, and media playback information inside a safely viewable location.

The bad: Navigation maps are low-resolution and difficult to see.

The bottom line: The 2012 Honda Civic Hybrid's eco-friendly tech and driver aids boost efficiency without greatly diminishing performance or comfort.

The poor Honda Civic Hybrid has always needed to live in the shadows. It was what I prefer to call a "second-tier hybrid" that didn't match the Toyota Prius or even its sibling, the Honda Insight, in green performance or even image. However, for 2012, the Honda Civic has already been refreshed. Visually, not much has changed. But under its skin the 2012 Honda Civic Hybrid is slightly stronger, much easier to live with, and more fuel-efficient compared to previous generation.

We put the Civic Hybrid to the test to determine if it's outgrown its second-tier stigma.

Blue is the brand new green
It's hard to tell a 2012 Civic from the 2011 model at speed. It's even harder to tell a 2012 Civic Hybrid from a standard 2012 Civic instantly. Only in direct comparison do the changes to the actual 2012 Civic become apparent.

Externally, the Hybrid model distinguishes itself in the standard with clear plastic trim with a slight azure tint. You'll find this bluish trim atop the grille and within the headlamps up front and the rear light cluster away back.

The Hybrid's upper and lower grilles have been reshaped to allow the sedan to slip through the environment with less drag. The wheel arches are filled with wheels unique to the hybrid model which have been designed to disturb less air with each rotation and also have been shod with low-rolling-resistance tires.

In the cabin, Honda has kept intact those attributes of the Civic sedan making it a safe decision for level-headed adults. The Civic's green house offers exceptional 360-degree visibility, reducing blind spots and making parallel parking very simple, even without a rearview camera option available. The four door offers good headroom and shoulder room, with controls that fall nicely to the hand. The bilevel instrument cluster seems less like the bridge of a spaceship now that we've had a couple of years to acclimate, but the new hard dashboard materials perform visually cheapen the Honda's interior, and drew comments through our passengers.

If Honda somewhat cheaped out on the actual dashboard materials, it must have spent the saved cash on sound deadening. The standard Civic's cabin was noticeably quieter than its competitors' and also the Hybrid was quieter still, thanks in part to it's power plant.

Honda's thriftiest hybrid

Where the standard Civic's engine room is occupied with a 1. 8-liter, 140-horsepower gasoline engine, the Hybrid has the 1. 5-liter gasoline engine that's augmented by Honda's Incorporated Motor Assist technology to output a combined 110 hp. Interestingly, the hybrid system's torque, at 127 pound-feet, is nearly identical to the gasoline engine's 128 pound-feet, so the hybrid doesn't sense less peppy around town. That's due to the new and more powerful 23-horsepower electric motor supplying 78 of those pound-feet from as little as 500rpm.

As in all IMA-equipped Honda vehicles, the electric motor works in tandem using the gasoline engine, rather than parallel to it. So the Civic Hybrid cannot cruise under only energy as cars with Ford's and Toyota's hybrid systems perform. The IMA does take advantage of a start-stop program that kills the gasoline engine when stopped and fires it back up by using the electric motor when it comes time to cv driving. Honda seems to have smoothed the stop-start changeover out since we last saw it, as the system seemed more tolerable than it did whenever we tested the Honda CR-Z.

Where the CR-Z featured a six-speed manual gearbox and also the Civic EX-L had a five-speed automatic, the Civic Hybrid has a single-option Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT) that is able to infinitely vary its ratios on the set range. The transmission has three modes: D may be the standard mode that is tuned for fuel efficiency, S is really a sport mode that allows the revs to rise as well as disables the start-stop system, and L is a low-ratio setting for... well, we're not sure what it's for, because we certainly don't believe Honda expects anyone to tow a load with the Hybrid. Even at its sportiest, this is not the gearbox that favors performance driving, but its unobtrusive operation creates a smooth and quiet ride.

If all of which fuel-economy technology wasn't enough, the 2012 Civic Hybrid includes a color-coded economy indicator in its instrument cluster that glows green when you are driving economically and blue when not, and an Econ switch that tunes the climate control systems, engine characteristics, and throttle response curve that will help you optimize your driving style. However, unlike the standard Civic's large green button, the hybrid's Econ button doesn't immediately transform the vehicle into a gutless wimp. Where the standard Civic's Econ mode felt like a massive compromise to cheat some more miles per gallon out of the EPA's test period, the Hybrid's Econ mode feels like a tool to make use of to help stretch the time between fill-ups.

Add everything up and the Civic Hybrid now finishes the EPA's test cycle having a rated fuel economy of 44 mpg city, 44 mpg freeway, and 44 mpg combined. It's not very often, when, that you see a car with the same scores over the board. In practice we were able to get the actual Civic Hybrid's trip computer to report 44. 1 mpg by concerning the half-tank mark with testing that emphasized freeway and back-road smooth sailing, peppered with a bit of city and stop-and-go generating. However, by the end of the week with an empty gas tank and quite a bit more aggressive city driving mixed in, the average experienced dropped to 40. 3 mpg--lower than the EPA's typical, but still quite respectable.