Already battered by poor reviews, the 2012 Honda Civic has now lost its Recommended Buy endorsement from Consumer Reports magazine.
Already battered by both weak reviews and production problems that have led to shortages of the latest redesign, the influential Consumer Reports magazine has pulled its recommendation of the 2012 Honda Civic which “scored too low” in its latest shoot-out among compact cars.
The news is another setback for the third-largest Japanese automaker, which had been counting on the 2012 Civic to overcome recent problems with various niche offerings, such as the Insight hybrid and Accord CrossTour.
In an increasingly competitive compact segment, the 2012 Honda Civic scored what the magazine described as a “mediocre” 61 points, down 17 points from the score of 78 for the previous-generation Civic.
“While other models like the Hyundai Elantra have gotten better after being redesigned, the Civic has dropped so much that now it ranks near the bottom of its category,” said David Champion, Consumer Reports’ lead auto tester.
The new Hyundai Elantra tops the latest list of compacts, says Consumer Reports' test results.
Despite widely-held expectations, the new Honda Civic has been roundly criticized for not only failing to break new ground but, in many areas, seeming to retreat on the Honda compact’s traditional strengths. Among other things, it has been faulted for an interior that uses seemingly cheaper plastic parts than the model it replaces, while ride quality and noise levels have worsened.
CR’s testers “found the 2012 Civic to be less agile and with lower interior quality than its predecessor. It also suffers from a choppy ride, long stopping distances, and pronounced road noise.”
While the Civic scores “too low to be recommended,” the magazine offerred strong praise for several of the other new models in the compact segment: the Ford Focus, the Hyundai Elantra – which topped the segment — and the Kia Forte, all of which outscored the Honda Civic.
On the positive side, Honda’s 2012 model “provides decent rear-seat room, and it achieved 30 mpg overall, which gives it the second-best fuel economy in its class—behind only the Toyota Corolla’s 32 mpg,” said a report by Consumer Reports.
Losing the magazine’s endorsement could be a serious blow for not just the 2012 Civic, but Honda overall.
The maker was hard hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Japanese auto industry. While Honda’s assembly network is being restored more quickly than originally anticipated it has nonetheless lost 100s of thousands of units of production. The newly-redesigned Civic, in fact, isn’t expected to reach normal output levels until sometime this autumn.
The maker had to abort its originally planned launch, delaying a national ad campaign until it had enough product to justify a campaign that could have nudged $100 million in overall cost, according to ad industry analysts.
Without the traditional Consumer Reports Recommended Buy imprimatur, it could be a harder sell, especially considering all the other negative reviews.
Honda has already watched the Civic slip down the sales charts – as has Toyota. The Chevrolet Cruze recently became the nation’s best-selling compact passenger car, surpassing both the Civic and Corolla, respectively.
Honda, TheDetroitBureau.com reported earlier this year, has had a variety of problems lately. A number of key niche entries have failed to generate much consumer response, and the maker’s top U.S. executive admitted that the CrossTour, a crossover based on the popular midsize Accord platform has largely been a failure. Many analysts would apply that term to other recent offerings, such as the Honda Insight and CR-V, as well as the ZDX crossover sold by the maker’s luxury Acura division.
The maker has had one significant recent hit with the re-designed Odyssey minivan. But the problems with the new Civic only put more pressure on Honda to get it right when it launches the next-generation CR-V crossover, later this year, and then rolls out the redesigned Accord.