Honda has announced plans to enter the FIA World Touring Car Championship with this, a hot new racer based on the newly redesigned 2012 Civic (well, the European five-door, anyway). Details are slim about the new touring car racer, but the automaker has released a statement confirming that the Civic will be powered by a bespoke 1.6-liter turbocharged inline-four, developed by Honda R&D in accordance with FIA’s Super 2000 regulations. Honda has also formed a joint partnership with Mugen and J.A.S. Motorsport to develop the new Civic.
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Today’s vehicles are more powerful, more efficient and safer than ever before. In fact, today’s car buyer would be hard pressed to spend his or her money on a genuinely bad vehicle. But those overall improvements may have also led consumers to believe there are no real differences between the various products offered by the world’s major automakers. According to the Consumer Reports 2012 Car-Brand Perception Survey, Toyota, Ford, Honda and Chevrolet have all seen their scores drop by double digits compared to last year. Read More »

J.D. Power and Associates has released its annual Customer Retention Study, and Hyundai ranks the highest among brands in retaining buyers. Hyundai’s retention rate is up four percentage points to 64 percent in 2012, thanks largely to the Elantra and Sonata models. J.D. Power says that much of the manufacturer’s retention rate can be traced to its growing vehicle offerings and positively changing perceptions about Hyundai quality and market appeal.
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Looking for the best value in a new car? Better make it Japanese, according to Consumer Reports. The go-to buyer’s guide has just finished compiling its list of the best values in the new-car market, and an overwhelming proportion of them hail from the Land of the Rising Sun.

CR took some 200 different vehicles into account, catalogued them into eleven categories and picked the best values based on the outcome of their own road tests, their reliability ratings and overall ownership costs (including depreciation) over a five-year term. The resulting 48 best values included 34 picks from Japanese automakers, six European, five American and three South Korean. Read More »

It’s no secret that the 2012 Honda Civic has been the subject of harsh criticism since its launch earlier this year. It’s also no secret that Honda is rushing to redesign the Civic, and while we originally reported that the new car would be coming sometime in 2013 or 2014, a memo to the automaker’s dealer network states that the reworked Civic will arrive before the end of 2012.
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In a roundtable with reporters at an event related to the Tokyo Motor Show, Tetsuo Iwamura, President and CEO of American Honda, told us that he’s been surprised by the Crosstour crossover’s slow sales:

“In the case of the Crosstour, I’m really disappointed because that’s a nice car, [with] very beautiful styling, and it gives very good driving performance as well as packaging. But yet, we went a bit too far.” Read More »

We knew Honda’s load-lugging curiosity, the Ridgeline pickup, was getting a modest refresh for the 2012 model year, and we even knew there was a new Sport model waiting in the wings. But now we have more details – including pricing.

For 2012, the Ridgeline range starts at $29,250* for the entry-level RT model and zooms all the way to $37,180* for the top-shelf RTL with navigation. The sweet spot, however, might just be the new Sport model shown above. At $29,995* it’s only $749 more than the base RT, yet includes such visual niceties as 18-inch alloys (the base RT rolls on 17-inch steelies), blacked-out honeycomb grille and matching light bezels, as well as fog lamps and tinted rear windows. Inside, there’s a leather-wrap wheel with audio controls, an aux input on the stereo and floor mats. (*All Ridgeline models are subject to a $810 delivery charge).

Range-wide changes for 2012 include a new front grille and various small aero improvements that help net the genre-straddling pickup a revised fuel economy rating of 15 city and 21 highway, an increase of 1 mpg on the interstate. The rest of the range remains basically unchanged, including the 3.5-liter V6 that offers 250 horsepower and 247 pound-feet of torque and its trademark in-bed trunk. Read More »