June launch for Honda's five-door Civic

Honda has announced the new Civic hatch will go on sale locally from the middle of next month — and the importer is keeping its powder dry on the subject of pricing and sales projections.

Back at the end of February, Honda Australia director Stephen Collins told the local press that the Civic hatch would "really take up the fight" in the heavily congested small hatchback sector of the market. Collins was introducing the new Civic sedan to the Australian media at the time. He asserted that Honda would be bouncing back from a weak market performance, due largely to lack of supply from Thai and Japanese factories affected by natural disasters last year.

But there has been no such disaster at Honda's Swindon plant in the UK, to excuse the slow sales of the current Civic hatch. In 2009, when the Civic Si five-door joined the Type R three-door model (also sourced from Swindon), even the manual variant was priced beyond the reach of many buyers, at $37,490. Opting for the five-speed auto option added another $2500 to that. No surprise that buyers who otherwise admire the Honda brand and its product stayed away in droves.

VFACTS figures since the hatch's launch here tell the tale. In 2009 Honda sold 394 Civic Si hatches — not many more than the 330 units of the even costlier Type R. That same year, the much more affordable Civic sedan sold 9126 units, yet experience over many years shows that hatches frequently outsell sedans in the same segment.

For 2010 the sales performance of the British-built Civic slipped even further behind. While the Civic sedan posted a better result — 9699 units sold — the Civic Si registered just 338 hits in the sales stats. That's fewer than 3.4 per cent of total Civic sales for the year.

The following year Honda lowered the price of the Civic Si to below $30,000 for the cloth-trimmed manual variant. In response, the market bought 1614 units for the year — effectively a five-fold improvement in sales over the previous year. The 2011 result suggests Honda will find buyers for the new Civic hatch provided it's priced at the right level.

According to Honda the new hatch will be sold in two levels of trim, VTi and VTi-L, hinting that the company has planned from the start for the VTi to be a price-leading offer to attract buyers on a budget. In either level of trim the Civic is powered by a revised version of Honda's 1.8 litre four cylinder i-VTEC engine, good for 104kW and 174Nm. Fuel consumption in combined-cycle testing, in accordance with ADR 81/02 will be 6.1L/100km for the manual variants and 6.5L/100km with the auto box option ticked.

Already rated a five-star car for crash safety by ANCAP, the Civic hatch will come with six airbags (including side curtains) and a number of other safety features consisting of: Advanced Compatibility Engineering (ACE) body structure, 'G-Con technology', tyre deflation warning system and a reversing camera for the VTi-L.

Honda plans to offer the Civic VTi-L flagship with leather seats, front-seat heating and Bluetooth audio streaming, among other features. And the company insists that both the flagship and the base-grade VTi will be well equipped and a paragon of design and build quality for the money.

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