Orders open early for Civic Type R

Time to put your money where your mouth is folks. The order book will officially open ahead of schedule for the new Honda Civic Type R hyper-hatch by the end of May.

And within a month of that Honda Australia should make clear the exact price of the new front-wheel drive Nurburgring lap record holder, first deliveries of which are due before the end of 2017.

With around 200 unofficial expressions of interest already logged with dealers around the country, Honda Australia has decided to bring forward the official order process, harvest some deposits and sort out customer preferences such as colour choice.

The preliminary specifications for the 235kW/400Nm 2.0-litre tearaway will come first and then official pricing, which will be close to $50,000 for the one highly-specified model that will be offered.

“The plan is by the end of this month we want to give the dealers at least preliminary information on the spec of the car,” Honda Australia director Stephen Collins told motoring media at this week’s Honda Civic hatch launch.

“I am not sure we will have the pricing nailed then, but we want to give them enough information to talk to the customers about what the car will have, what performance will be, what the colours are, so we can start what we call a pre-order program.

“And soon after that – it will have to be June for sure – we will look at pricing and so forth.”

Collins spent plenty of time parrying queries from the media about the car’s pricing, admitting there was still some calculating to be done.

“We want to target the $50,000 mark,” he said. “We still need to work that out. It depends on the strength of the Aussie dollar.

“We want to hit that sweet spot in the hot hatch segment and it's around that $50,000 mark. There is a bit of water to go under the bridge yet before we do finalise it.”

Hitting that pricepoint will pitch the manual front-drive Type R against the some heavy all-wheel drive competition, including the $50,990 Ford Focus RS, the $49,490 Subaru WRX STI and the $52,990 Volkswagen Golf R.

The Hyunda i30 N and fourth-generation Renault Megane RS will also soon add to the competition.

Good news for potential Type R buyers is that supply won’t be limited from the UK plant, where it will be exclusively built. Collins forecast a sales rate of more than 100 per month would be expected and met.

“I think if we can sell them we should be able to get them,” he said.

“We want it to be a car we sell reasonable volumes of, so we are talking around 100 per month. Now as you know, those types of cars have a good [sales] period early on and then tend to fall off quite steeply.

“So, at this stage we are not committed to volumes, but we want to make it seen out there on the road.”

While 100 sales per month makes the Type R only a niche seller, Collins said its value extended far wider than that as an image rebuilder for Civic and Honda.

“I think there is no doubt we have been chasing more sportiness in our range, so I think it’s really important in terms of our brand going forward in terms of appealing to younger and sporty customers,” he said.

Honda Australia has been in a slump in recent years, essentially halving sales from more than 60,000 in 2007 to just under 33,000 in 2014. However, it is forecasting 48,000 sales in 2017 on the back of the introduction of the new Civic hatch and the fifth-generation CR-V that launches within months.