Review of the new Honda Civic - The Brits Behind It

We're almost conditioned to view the British motor industry as a joke, the last throes of some Imperial legacy and one which will shrivel and die before our eyes. While that may sadly be true of the big British volume manufacturers, it's taken foreign investment to show that world class cars can be produced in this country. Honda has demonstrated that great cars can be built profitably and productively and can showcase a very particular success story with the Civic family hatch.

The Civic story is, at the time of writing, turning a pivotal page. It's not too often a car is launched that, at a stroke, managed to make all of its rivals look way behind the curve. This however, is what Honda achieved with their current Civic - a car that hails from the Honda UK Manufacturing plant near Swindon.

In times past, despite the success of the excellent Type-R version, the rest of the Civic range would rarely appear on the radar of anybody under fifty years old and the average age for the range as a whole was nudging sixty. One of the key changes Honda identified with the development of the eighth generation Civic was to turn the heads of younger buyers. The sixth generation car has done exactly that, preliminary figures suggesting that the Civic now has an age profile amongst buyers that's younger even than Ford's Focus, the car previously seen as the dynamic choice in this sector.

Demand has increased and so has the manufacturing capacity at the Swindon plant to deal with it. Also exporting CR-V utility models around the globe, this state of the art facility features two productions lines with three shifts, turning out up to 870 cars a day at full capacity. It wasn't always so. It took fully fourteen years for Honda UK to produce their first half million cars, that figure being reached in 1999. The next half million took four years and the subsequent half million a mere 24 months. Perhaps Peugeot, who recently shut their Ryton plant down citing poor productivity, would have been better advised to benchmark Honda's management techniques, although implementing the Honda way would have required a fundamental change in corporate culture.

"This Civic may carry a Japanese badge but it's heart and soul will be forever Wiltshire"

Some 4,000 of Honda's 131,600 global 'Associates' are employed at the South Marston factory outside Swindon, with 3,500 assigned to the twin production lines. A key component of the local economy, fully 80 per cent of Associates live within a 30-mile radius of Swindon. Formerly the Vickers plant, this site covers 370 acres and is the UK's fourth largest car factory. Innovation is a key word here, the factory being the only manufacturing facility in Britain that can build both petrol and diesel engines on the same production line, helping Honda respond to demand quickly and flexibly.

To give an idea of where the cars are destined for, 27 per cent will be sold in the UK, 33 per cent go to the USA, just over 39 per cent to mainland Europe and the remaining fraction of a per cent represent Type-R models that are exported to Japan. In this country, the Type-R has been a significant part of the product mix, making up over 40 per cent of all Civic 3 door sales, although the factory is in a Type-R hiatus at the moment with the new model not due to be launched until March 2007.

For the time being at least, sales are looking very promising. A slight dip in the final year of sales of the seventh generation model has been obliterated by demand for the eight generation car. Bucking the trend for successive Civics to be bigger and heavier than their predecessors, the current car is significantly more compact than the seventh generation model. Overall length is 35mm less and the car stands lower by the same amount. In order to create a more dynamic stance, width has increased by 65mm. It's this change in dimensions that give the Civic its rather pugnacious demeanour.

Sales have traditionally been weighted heavily in favour of petrol five door cars but the introduction of the excellent 2.2-litre diesel into the Civic and the increased production of sporty three door models is evening out the split somewhat. The old Type R made up around 17 per cent of all Civic sales in the UK and the new model may well even exceed this figure, the concept car creating a real buzz and attracting numerous letters of intent when it was unveiled at the British International Motor Show. But if sales of Civic are on the rise, where are these new customers coming from? Honda have identified Volkswagen as the key rival that they hope to snatch 'conquest sales' from.

Certainly the volume seller of the Civic line up, the 1.8-litre ES petrol five-door model, undercuts its Golf rival by several hundred pounds, is more powerful, quicker, and more economical to boot with a longer standard equipment list thrown into the mix as a sweetener. It's easy to see why even dyed in the wool Volkswagen customers could see the appeal in the pert Honda instead of the rather staid Golf.

The Panoramic glass sunroof has proved popular amongst Civic customers, with many also opting for wheel upgrades and the rear car parking camera that's also offered as an option on cars fitted with satellite navigation. There's also an aero kit to give the Civic an even more aggressive appearance.

The Honda Civic is a British success story the like of which will have escaped many potential customers. With some manufacturers taking a critical appraisal of their British factories, it's worth getting behind one that has got things very right.

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