This car stands out from the pack on its looks ... but little else

If you drive like my grandmother – a woman who never saw a speed limit she didn’t think was 20km/h too high – you’ll find this car extremely pleasant.

Stephen Corby

Honda HR-V. Photo Source: Supplied

3 min read

1:30PMMay 09, 2024

After their fawning excitement at meeting me subsides, strangers often ask how I choose which cars to fiercely analyse each week and, while it is usually a careful and scientific process based on the lunar calendar and how it aligns with the global launch timelines of new vehicles, sometimes it’s not.

Sometimes I just wander around a very large shed in suburban Sydney pointing at new cars like a sheik and saying: “Yes, that one, it looks pretty.” This shed actually exists and is the place where most of the big car companies prepare their press fleets of new vehicles for the tender ministrations of motoring journalists.

It is staffed by hugely knowledgeable, mechanically minded men who are constantly in the kind of bad mood you’d be in if part of your job was cleaning cars that felt brand new a week ago when you sent them out with some spoiled, self-important scribe and have now returned looking like a tribe of teenagers held a fried-food fight in the back seats while someone else shaved a dog in the boot.

I like to distract them by pointing at things that I don’t recognise and asking stupid questions like, “What is that?” Or “Does it have an engine?” Both of these inquiries were raised when I saw a Honda HR-V slathered in almost Ferrari-red paint and leaping out of a surrounding sea of mediocrity like a narwhal from a bowl of goldfish. My, but it is a fine-looking machine, particularly among its drab small SUV competitors, with a strong face and body-coloured grille that provide the kind of eye-grabbing wow factor you’d expect from Alfa Romeo. Fortunately, however, it’s a Honda, which means you can buy one without the fears of mechanical misery.

It also looks handsome from pretty much every angle, although it did make me frown a little when I raised the tailgate to find a surprisingly small boot (304 litres), with barely enough room to groom a cavoodle. (Although if you drop its clever Magic Seats, which disappear into the floor, you’ll have a whopping 1274L, enough to comb a donkey.)

The Honda HR-V e:HEV L has a surprisingly small boot. Picture: Supplied

While it is spacious and pleasant inside, there’s a certain sniff of antiquity about the plastics, and the touchscreen in particular. It all works – even the wireless Apple CarPlay functions 90 per cent of the time, which is quite good compared to BMW and other Euros – yet it feels a bit like an iPhone 3: functional but a fashion fail. Plus, there’s no wireless charging, which is a huge oversight.

I had arranged to pick up the HR-V straight after returning from Swedish Lapland and was alarmed to find that Honda seems to have put a lot of effort into its air-conditioning system, offering something called an Air Diffusion System that uses L-shaped vents to give you the option of blowing cold air around you rather than drying out your eye sockets. Strangely I found it overwhelmingly freezing no matter how I adjusted it, and longed for the relative warmth of the Arctic Circle.

Hondas always feel well engineered, properly put together and sharp to drive, particularly in a steering and handling sense, and the HR-V feels best in class in terms of ride and driver feedback, but the problem with this one is in its full name – the HR-V e:HEV L hybrid. That means you’re getting a 1.5-litre, non-turbo engine, plus two electric motors and a small battery attached to a fixed-gear transmission that Honda calls an e-CVT. The good news is that this system allows you to spend more time in quiet and efficient electric-driving mode than other hybrids, according to Honda. The even better news is that you can get 930km of range out of its relatively small 40-litre tank, with an urban fuel-economy figure as low as 2.9 litres per 100km.

The good news is that this system allows you to spend more time in quiet and efficient electric-driving mode than other hybrids. Picture: Supplied

The bad news is that this cleverly miserly configuration makes just 96kW and 253Nm. Also, CVTs (Constantly Variable Transmissions) are bloody awful, and this one is no exception. Yes, if you drive like my grandmother – a woman who never saw a speed limit she didn’t think was 20km/h too high – it’s all very pleasant, because you can cruise around pretending you’ve bought an EV and frightening pedestrians (I had two people unwittingly step out in front of me). But if you’d like to accelerate with even mild enthusiasm, or you’d like to get up that steep hill sometime today, you’re in for a feast of whining, straining and complaining from the accursed gearbox.

The fact that this seemingly capacious small SUV only has four seats suggests that perhaps it is aimed at grandparents who don’t need to carry humans in the back often and will only ever drive it cautiously, but what’s harder to explain is the price – a whopping $47,000 for the e:HEV L hybrid variant.

That’s enough money to get you a bigger, mid-sized SUV with significantly more power. Vitally, however, none of those options are as pretty as the Honda.