2022 Honda Civic Hatchback

BRIAN WONG: Our long-term 2022 Honda Civic Si has been with us for about nine months and covered nearly 9,000 miles. And in that time, it's gone around our test track, on road trips with our editors, and even won a U-Drags battle against its fancier cousin, the Acura Integra. That's all very exciting. But if you were to ask members of our staff how they feel about the Si, they're a lot less excited. And that lukewarm reception is strange for a car that's such a solid performer. In this long-term update, we try to find out why. If you also had teenage dreams of owning an Si or an Integra, hit those likes and subscribe buttons. And if you're interested in selling your car, head over to edmunds.com/sellmycar to get an instant cash offer. Just to let you know, unlike many of the other vehicles in our long-term fleet, we didn't buy this Si. It's on loan to us from Honda for the year so we can give it a more thorough evaluation. Now, back to the car. The Si remains a good performance bargain. The only options on our vehicle are this blazing orange pearl paint and a set of summer tires, an options box that we love to check given Los Angeles penchant for year round sunshine, recent atmospheric river excepted. Under the hood, we have 9,000 miles of accumulated dust and leaves as well as this turbocharged 1.5 liter four-cylinder that comes mated to a six-speed manual transmission. And that is the only transmission option as God intended. Now if this setup sounds familiar, that's because it's the exact same specifications as the one that was under the last generation Civic Si. And the new car is even down on horsepower compared to that vehicle, dropping from 205 to 200 horsepower. Inside, the Si comes with front sport seats with colorful accents, a 9-inch touchscreen with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and a long list of standard safety features. It's not that the Civic Si does anything wrong. It just doesn't do quite enough right. If we had sort of a Civic fun meter and you expected the regular Civic to be maybe here and the Type R to be all the way up here, you might expect the Si to come in somewhere in the middle. But when we line the three civics up and we look at their power and how they do in our performance testing, you find that instead of splitting the difference, the Si kind of ends up a lot closer to the regular Civic on a lot of those metrics. One thing we do really like about the Si is this six-speed manual transmission. The thrills are short. It's appropriately notchy. And the clutch action is very linear and very predictable. I actually think that if you're trying to learn how to drive a manual, this is one of the best cars to learn on. As good as this manual transmission is, the powertrain suffers from rev hang. And that's something we noticed with the last Si as well. Rev hang happens when you take your foot off the gas, but the engine's revs don't immediately drop down to idle like you're expecting. This phenomenon is more common on modern vehicles as a way to control emissions. But in the Si, it's particularly noticeable, especially at higher RPMs. So when you go from, let's say, third gears here to fourth gear, the revs hang for a moment. And it makes the transition between the gears a little rough and a little abrupt. It's hard to do it smoothly. Again, this only really happens when you're driving the Si hard. Driving around day to day, you won't really notice it. But if you're on any kind of fun road or on an autocross, it's going to make the car bounce around whenever you upshift unless you clutch in, shift, and then delay, and then get back on the gas. And no one really wants to do that when you're out having fun. On the flip side, downshifts are dreamy. The Si has a rev-matching system. So whenever you downshift, it blips the engine and matches the revs for you. This makes downshifts a lot smoother and keeps the engine in the thick of its powerband between shifts. The technique to do this without this feature is called heel-toe. And that requires you to artfully hit both the gas and the brake at the same time to keep the revs up when you downshift. And if that sounds hard, it is. It's a tough technique to master. But the Civic will do it all for you. If we go back and look at our performance table, we find that the only place that the Si really does split the difference between the run-of-the-mill Civic and the Type R is in lateral G. And that's something that we measure on our skidpad. And that tracks with another positive that we've noticed about the Si, good handling. Now, all of that sounds pretty good. So I was surprised when I went through our long-term term logbook preparing for this video to find that many of the comments skewed quite negative. BRENT ROMANS: There were a few things that I didn't care about it, the uncomfortable seats, kind of a stiff ride quality. And even the engine was kind of like meh. But I did really enjoy the handling of that car. Anytime I was coming up to a freeway entrance ramp and you could kind of circle around it, I could dive in and just get on it. And it was super fun. It was stable and controlled. For the money, that was probably the biggest thing that I liked about it. JOSH SADLIER: As we noted in our test data, car's actually not appreciably quicker than it was in the 2000s, about the same level of acceleration. Now, you've got turbo lag. So you don't have that immediacy with the throttle. You don't have that high-revving VTEC experience that of course I remember fondly. Fair enough. Times change. But if you're going to take that away, give me more power. BRIAN WONG: Our only maintenance costs so far have been the cars first service, which we got done in September. That consisted of changing the oil and rotating the tires. And it cost us $120.85. Other than that, the car has been perfectly reliable. As you'd expect, it is a Honda. After hours of deliberation, I think I finally figured it out. And the problem isn't with the Civic Si, it's with our expectations. If you were to ask our editors what kind of score they would give the Si just off the top of their heads, a lot of them would say something like a 7, 7.5. But what they really should be saying is 8.1 because that's the score that we give the normal Civic. And that's good enough for that car to take home our Edmunds Top Rated Car Award for two years running. The fix for the Si is simple. Honda could add more power. And that would add more excitement, bring it up to expectations, and give the Si the score that it deserves. Be sure to check back with us in a few months for a final wrap-up video for this car to see if it's changed our tune.