Can the Civic tackle winter?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/03/2022 (1498 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Kelly Taylor told me we’d be testing a 2022 Honda Civic, truth is I was actually excited to get behind the wheel of a small car again. The chance to save gas money for a week and maybe even have some fun after a long winter was indeed welcome.

Then I looked at the forecast.

I picked up the Civic on the Monday evening before the big blizzard, the spiffy Aegean Blue Metallic paint was a nice contrast to the snow that was starting to blow. I was also pleasantly surprised to see a manual gear shift, normally I joke that shifting gears is only fun when wearing a helmet and riding a motorcycle, but in a Civic it’s a breeze to flick through the gears and with a fresh set of winter tires the drive back to our home just east of Birds Hill Park, despite the emerging storm, was both enjoyable and uneventful.

By the next morning the shiny Civic was pretty much buried in the snow.

As a lifelong gearhead and longtime rural commuter I always pride myself on making it into work on snow days — and this one, despite being the longest lasting blizzard in these parts for more than a quarter century — didn’t stop me. I simply waded through the knee-deep snow in front of my shop, brushed off the snow, turned the key and drove away — in my Chevrolet Silverado with the 4×4 engaged — because let’s be honest here — that little Civic wasn’t going anywhere!

The storm eventually subsided and the Civic was brushed off on Wednesday and dug out and actually performed admirably even through the mostly still snow-covered rural roads around our place and those dreaded ruts found all over city streets.

By Thursday things were pretty much cleared up and I finally got a chance to put my foot into that sweet little 1.5L turbocharged engine and wring out the 180 horsepower — and it didn’t disappoint.

Normally I’m a big fan of SUVs and trucks for the winter, and until January my daily driver was actually a Honda Pilot, but a nice man in a Mazda with three bald tires and the doughnut spare for the fourth ran a stop sign and T-boned me, sending my beloved Pilot to the big wrecking yard in the sky.

Normally I am fortunate enough to have two vehicles insured, a pickup truck to haul our garbage and tow my toys, and for the last couple of years the Pilot as well, so I’ve been thinking about replacing the Pilot with a small car for my commute.

Presently, and I’m certain you don’t need me to tell you, gas is at $1.70 per litre and my Silverado burns about 17 litres per 100 kilometres of driving. Each day I drive about 100 km, so it costs me in the neighbourhood of $30 a day in fuel to drive back and forth to the Free Press.

The Civic, even with the potent and endlessly fun turbocharged engine, averaged 7.5 litres per 100 km, meaning it only cost me about $13 to make the same return trip.

Math was never my strong subject, at least not until my wallet became involved. Including weekends, driving a Civic instead of my Silverado would result in considerable fuel cost savings of about $450 a month — to drive the exact same distance.

I can buy a Civic for about that in monthly payments, and after a week in the new version, it is now near the top of my list of cars I’m seriously considering.

Kelly has covered all the bells and whistles on this model, and the new Civic is indeed a fine car, our fellow members in the Automobile Journalist Association of Canada liked it so much they crowned it Canadian Car of the Year for 2022 and it has been Canada’s best-selling car for 24 consecutive years.

Civics are regarded for their reliability and fuel economy and even the stout turbo still gets great mileage, so it gets full marks from me and is fully capable of getting me where I need to go, and back, at least 364 days of the year.

Kelly summed it up best when I told him the Civic didn’t make it out of my driveway on the morning of the storm so I had to drive my truck.

“You probably should have just worked from home,” he said with a laugh. I’m sure he was grinning, but I couldn’t tell, because he was working from home.

Willy@freepress.mb.ca