Honda will race a redesign of the much-criticized new Civic to market ASAP.
It has not been a very good year, according to John Mendel, Honda of America’s top U.S. executive. Not only has the maker been hammered by a series of production cuts – the latest the result of flooding in Thailand – but one of its most important products has received a critical drubbing from the media and a tepid response from potential buyers.
That will send the maker’s designers and engineers back to work to come up with a significant “refresh” of the 2012 Honda Civic, reports Automotive News, which should be ready to go to market in time for the 2013 model-year.
“We take feedback seriously, regardless of who it’s from, and we will act accordingly quickly,” John Mendel, American Honda executive vice president, said in an interview in San Diego, where the maker is revealing another critical new model, the 2012 Honda CR-V.
Suggesting the maker is “appropriately energized,” Mendel said Honda is hoping to act as quickly as possible to address criticism of the latest-generation Civic. The question is how much can be done in short order. The 2012 version of the compact Civic was the result of a 6-year gestation and normally Honda spends at least three years to develop a mid-cycle update.
But few of the carmaker’s products have received nearly the drubbing that has been handed the Civic since it debuted earlier this year. Critics faulted it for its unambitious, holdover styling, its extensive use of cheap plastics in the interior, and the mediocre performance, among other things.
Driving home that message, the Civic became the target of an unusually aggressive review by influential Consumer Reports magazine, normally a fan of Honda products. For the first time in years, the non-profit publication lifted its Recommended Buy from the 2012 Civic update.
Complicating matters, Honda was hit hard by the production shortages that followed the March 11 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. That disrupted the launch of the 2012 Civic just as the maker was rolling out an ambitious national advertising campaign.
In an interview with TheDetroitBureau.com, Mendel noted that Honda of America has lost 200,000 units of production since March. That has forced dealers to sell whatever they’ve had left on their lots, drawing down their inventories from a collective 170,000 vehicles a year ago to just 50,000 right now.
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Honda had been hoping to stage a re-launch of the Civic – alongside the new CR-V crossover. But that was before the maker was slammed by yet another natural disaster.
The ongoing flooding in Thailand has inundated the maker’s plant there. And while Honda of America does not import cars from the Southeast Asian nation, Thai-made components, notably microprocessors, are used on all six Honda assembly plants in the U.S. and Canada.
As a result, TheDetroitBureau.com reported yesterday, Honda will have to slash production at the North American production network by half in the coming weeks, while the introduction of the CR-V is likely also to be rolled back.
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