Originally posted by TJSwoboda:
First, to some people and you know who you are: Honda's what sucks? You don't mind Honda's what? Did you people graduate sixth grade? Carol H. Tapdancing Shelby in a riced out Civic, go back to f***ing grade school. There, is that an example of erudite prose or what?

Anyhoo, I was a huge fan of Honda until recently; I don't hate them now, but Nissan has dethroned Honda as my favorite Japanese manufacturer. Five years (that's "years," not "year's") ago the Civic Si was the best car that could be had for $17.5K, bar none. Once the engine was broken in these cars (again, note the lack of an apostrophe) were capable of 0-60 runs in just 7.1 seconds. And, the Prelude utterly DOMINATED the mid-$20K range as far as I'm concerned.

By this time, though, you already had our SVT Contours on the market which were capable of the same acceleration (6.9 to 60) and handling in the same class as the Prelude. And over the last five years we've seen a renaissance of performance while Honda has mostly lagged, and the Civic has only become more and more overpriced for what you get. As a business model, this seems to make sense: People are willing to pay dearly for the reputation of reliability that comes with a Civic. My mom bought a four-door LX 5spd last year. The engine note is kind of thrashy; this is in VERY stark contrast to her previous car, a '90 Accord LX 5spd that would sing to you, urging you all the way to redline. Fifteen grand (before tax&title) gets you only 115 horsepower; if I were buying a car in this class, it would be a Hyundai Elantra GLS stripper with 140 horsepower, a manual tranny, tach and power everything (yep, standard) for maybe a little over thirteen grand out the door.

I wish Honda would become more performance oriented once again, but I'm not sure it makes good business sense for them to do so, any more than it would have made sense for Ford to make the Mustang faster than the Camaro when the Mustang was already kicking the Camaro's ass in sales. If it isn't broken (from a business standpoint), why fix it?

--T.J.



Very well put. I loved Honda in the late 80's and early 90's, but they have diverged from my vision. Bigger, heavier, etc. I love Nissan, though. They are kicking some serious butt, IMO, and if my dollar were going out for a new car today, I'd seriously consider a Nissan/Infinity (esp. the G35 )

Function before fashion. '96 Contour SE "Toss the Contour into a corner, and it's as easy to catch as a softball thrown by a preschooler." -Edmunds, 1998