(copy pasting my comments on facebook)
Finally got some time to check out the new civic in person. I'd like to divide it into two parts for review. Exterior and interior (trust me, both are 180 degrees from each other) Exterior is simply amazing, the side lines flow towards the back of the vehicle and merge with sort of "shoulder" that they make with the rear head lights. This gives the car a very wide look from the back. As much as I hated the rear in pictures, I fell in love with it the moment I set my eyes on it. Its BEAUTIFUL, you just need to see it personally. That awkward curve in the rear bumper doesn't even gets noticed when you see the car from the back. The rims that looked ugly in the pictures look good enough in real, could've been better though. Those small reflectors also look good on the trunk lid. Oh, trunk lid, it had to be smashed hard to close, dont know what was wrong! The overall height of the car seems to be lesser then the 8th generation civic. One thing that surprised me was that there was NO HID in the projectors
Coming over to interior,one word would describe it all, CRAMPED!!! First thing that i noticed was the door panels are kind of, dull. A person close to 6 feet high will certainly hit his head on the roof when sitting in the rear seat and there is NO ASH TRAY in the rear. When sitting in the rear seat, the view of the dashboard looks narrow and cramped, reason being that it IS
The front seats are good, comfortable but not so spacious. Steering wheel is excellent, small, sporty and easy to grip. The button on it are soft. The I-MID screen is good, the DVD screen is good too but the plastic housing that it sits in looks very bad, low quality stuff. The dashboard otheriwise has good quality. The worst optional feature would be the auto-air con. the panel is small, buttons feel pathetic and there are not enough lights in it. Even the A/C button does not have a light. Though there is a small screen above it but that is not enough. Directly beneath the a/c controls there is 6-8 inches of absolutely nothing! just black plastic with a cigarette lighter and aux input in the middle of the black plastic box. Coming further down, towards the gear level, the lever itself is good, very sporty infact but its surrounded by pointlessly blank plastic molding. The hand brake in the 8th gen was amazing, the design was too good, sadly, Honda has taken it back We again have that decades old style black colored overexposed hand brake.
All in all, interior really disappointed me, mostly due to its narrow and cramped space. Exterior is simply amazing. The verdict, if you have the money, go get one
and oh, under the hood, right above the radiator, theres the silly cable that opens that the bonnet. The cable is exposed and it takes a stupid U turn right over the chassis plate, seems like someone retrofitted it