I fell in love with the Honda Civic Type R, until it started fighting me
Porter can tolerate the tsunami of active safety features, but not their inaccuracy
There’s nothing quite like the warm feeling of kinship you get from meeting someone new and discovering they share your taste in music or have the same favourite film. And I’ve just had this same sort of feeling from driving the latest Honda Civic Type R. Dear God, it’s good.
I like the way the engine doesn’t feel turbocharged and makes you rev it rather than plopping out a big turd of torque at 2200rpm. I like the superb gearshift, the firmness of the brake pedal and the taut, 911 GT3-style response of the steering. I like the way the ride is stiff but not so concrete you couldn’t live with it every day. I like the way it has bountiful grip without making that the defining characteristic of its handling. I like its occasional wiggles of torque steer, just to remind you it’s a hot hatch.
> Honda Civic Type R (FL5) review – the king of hot hatches doesn’t have long left
Most of all, I like the way it gave me a heady sense of kinship with the strangers who developed it, because this is how I want a Civic Type R to feel. Their taste is my taste, and that’s heartwarming. Except for one thing.
Any car built after July 2024 is required under the EU’s GSR2 rules to come with a raft of active safety features and, though the UK hasn’t officially adopted these, it’s not worth car makers’ time to build different specs for this country, so we get them too.
One of these compulsory features is lane departure mitigation, in which the car will actively tug at the steering if it thinks you’re drifting onto the wrong side of the road. On paper, you can see the wisdom of insisting on this tech. In practice, these systems are frustratingly hopeless, getting spooked by faded lines or unfamiliar layouts or Tuesdays. And you and me, we like driving, we’re paying attention. Imagine if you’re one of those people who sits 10cm from the airbag and clearly finds driving a frightening chore; having your car suddenly yank you towards the verge in a blaze of beeps and flashing graphics must be downright terrifying.
The Civic Type R’s lane departure mitigation system is state-of-the-art, by which I mean shit, and seems especially wrong-footed by perfectly safe A-road overtaking moves, during which it starts fussing the wheel when you’d rather it would leave you alone. You can turn it off, but doing so involves a tedious press, scroll and click routine you must do at the start of every journey. Still, at least you can kill it.
That’s not the case with the Civic’s other baked-in irritation, its speed limit warning. I’m not entirely comfortable with car enthusiasts reflexively raging against these now-mandatory alerts, because in doing so what they seem to be saying is, ‘How dare anyone warn me when I’m breaking the law?’ and it all starts to sound like spluttering man-babies having a hissy because nanny won’t let them play with their brmm-brmms. The real thing to rage about with these overspeed warnings is their inaccuracy.
I once got bonged at by a Hyundai for exceeding 5mph, which was, in fairness, the posted speed limit in the car park I’d just left but emphatically not the correct speed for where I now found myself, which was on the M5. A couple of months ago I was in a Golf GTI Clubsport using another part of so-called Intelligent Speed Assist, the speed limit-adherent cruise control, when it spontaneously decided that the legal maximum through some roadworks on the M4 was 110mph and then tried to get me there as aggressively as it could. So yeah, it’s morally hard to argue against a device that warns you if you speed, but only if that device works flawlessly, which it never bloody does.
I’m sure things will get better. Car tech always starts janky and gets de-bugged, which is why keyless entry no longer lets the car keep running and driving without warning you that your wife has got out with the key in her bag and is now on a train to Dundee.
In the meantime, the best that car companies can do is make these mandated annoying features as unannoying as possible, and this is where the otherwise truly wonderful Civic Type R falls down. It’s too fiddly to shut down the lane assist and impossible to do the same to the speed warning. Both spoil a superb car that, in all other respects, feels like it was made by people who enjoy the same things as me.
What really hurts is that it doesn’t have to be like this. The Renault 5 has a little button between the wheel and the door that puts the car into ‘personal’ mode, instantly neutralising under-performing safety systems to your exact requirements. It’s a brilliantly simple but effective set-up and I wish all new cars had it. More specifically, I wish the Honda Civic Type R had it. Because then it really would feel like kinship in the shape of a car.
This story was first featured in evo issue 335.
