2.0 i-VTEC S Auto 5dr 4 X 4

Very quiet, smooth ride, comfortable but with many aggravating minor design shortcomings

In 2003 Honda ran a series of adverts on the TV saying "Isn't it nice when things work as they should do?" (Do you remember the ball bearing rolling along and setting off all sorts of gadgetry?). I used to sit in front of the tele watching that advert thinking to myself – Yes, that absolutely describes my new CRV. What a wonderful, practical car that was. Nine years and 155,000 miles of trouble free motoring later I had my first big bill for putting something right and I said to myself: the time has come, all good things come to an end, she has to go.

I cannot get excited about cars. To me, cars and ironing boards are in the same category – they are bits of kit with a job to do. The only difference is that cars are a lot more expensive and more hassle prone.

So it was that I decided to take the coward's way out – buy another CRV and trust that Honda are still the masters of practicality. And so it was that I ordered a new CRV, the newest and latest model, even before it had arrived in the showrooms. Oh dear.

I ordered the most basic version for several reasons. The main one was that only the basic model has 17inch wheels (18 inch wheels might be OK on well-maintained main roads, 19 inch wheels might cope with the silky smooth boulevards of the French Riviera, but where I live the potholes and general state of the roads are horrendous and I need as much rubber as possible between me and the road). The other reason was that the gadgetry of the higher spec models seemed to offer nothing of practical advantage but increased the scope for things going wrong (probably expensively). The only exception was that the basic model does not have parking sensors fitted as standard but I had them fitted as an extra.

The new CRV is extraordinarily quiet, has a superbly smooth ride and is very comfortable to sit in. So 10 out of 10 for those. Having got the big things right, Honda have spoiled the enjoyment of the car by building in a host of minor aggravations. The new CRV is a long way from the world of " Isn't it nice when things work as they should do?".

The new CRV is highly geared and so gutless at 70mph going up even moderate inclines – I have to use the paddle shift to keep up with traffic on the motorway or to pull away smartly from traffic lights – not a major problem but it largely destroys the point of having an automatic. (Maybe the diesel versions perform better.)

In the old CRV, if I put my foot down, there was in instant response. With the new CRV it feels as if an awful lot of rubber bands need to tighten up before the car starts shifting. Ducking out of side roads in the rush hour has been replaced by endless patience waiting for a big enough gap to appear in the oncoming traffic.

The new CRV has electric steering. I still find the electric steering to be disconcerting as there is no feel for what the front wheels are doing – you have to turn the wheel, hope for the best and then wait for the car to turn as confirmation that the steering actually does something. This is a discomfort which has lessened but not disappeared through increased familiarity (a posh way of saying that if you can't do anything about it, you have to lump it).

The ignition key has three sections – for locking the car, unlocking it and unlocking the rear window. The three sections are separated by two small ridges. In the dark, in the pouring rain, it is all but impossible to distinguish one section from another. For someone wearing gloves, it would be impossible. Hence getting drenched (and infuriated) on several occasions so far.

Internal storage space is hopeless (particularly as compared with the old CRV).
The new CRV has

A glove box big enough to take the handbook but nothing else

A massive box at the back of the central console, so far back that it is impossible to see what is in the box while you are driving and so deep that whatever gets put in it will be lost forever from civilisation

A set of three cup holders on the central console covered by a flap which opens upwards and towards from the driver making it annoyingly difficult for the driver to use the cup holders. Also they are so small that they will not take regular size cups. Why have three useless holders taking the space where two proper sized ones could have been?

A tiny alcove big enough to take a very small amount of parking money

Small pockets built into the passenger doors (too small to take, say, an Ordnance Survey map).

A pocket at the base of the driver's door. It would be an interesting challenge to students studying design at University to design anything so simple as a pocket in the door of a car with the number of design defects that Honda has managed to achieve. The pocket is hard plastic, narrow and deep – so deep that anything at the bottom of the pocket is out of reach, or sometimes just within fingertip reach and other times can be pushed by the extremities of fingertip along the pocket to where the pocket is shallow enough to pull the object out by pressing it between fingertip and the side of the pocket in the hope of dragging it out of the pocket – unfortunately the pocket has sharp internal ridges which prevent anything being dragged out of the pocket. How could something so trivial as a pocket in a car door be such a cause of desperate frustration? That takes genius.

For comparison with how things used to be, and could still be if the designers put their minds to it, my old CRV had

Decent sized pockets in all four doors, big enough to take several Ordnance Survey maps with plenty of room to spare for other bits and pieces

A decent size glove pocket big enough to take the manual and more Ordnance Survey maps and a bird spotting book or two

A pull out tray under the passenger's seat

A cool box big enough to take a couple of cans of drink

Another similar sized compartment underneath the cool box

Underneath that, a slide out drawer

Underneath that, an ashtray useful for taking more bits and pieces

Two decent sized cup holders

A compartment built into the central console which could take half a dozen Cds with room to spare

A largish cubby hole and a drop down drawer to the right of the driver's knee


The buttons controlling the heating, air conditioning, fan, rear window/mirror defrost, front window demist form a flat panel so that it is impossible to tell by feel which control you are pressing. Above those controls is an illuminated panel telling you what the heater settings are currently. Unfortunately the buttons are so badly designed, the panel is so low down and the symbols are so small that one has to take one's eyes of the road for an uncomfortably long time to register what is happening. (On the old CRV there were three easy-to-locate easy-to-use knurled dials.)

The air conditioning seems unable to cope with high humidity. In heavy rain the top of the windscreen and the rear side windows mist up.

The heating is slow to warm up (in frosty weather it is about 10 minutes before the car starts to feel warm and 20 minutes before it is comfortably warm).

The gear shift has no illuminated indicator lights to show what gear selection has been made (this is shown on the dashboard display panel but if you are parked with the steering wheel at an angle it obscures the display panel).

Occasionally there is a disconcerting bong sound like those you get in airports. To begin with, this was baffling. Then I noticed that soon after the bong sound there appeared a curious triangle of orange dots on the dashboard display and then the penny dropped. This was a warning that the temperature had dropped to 3°C. Bizarrely there is no continuing warning that temperatures are down to freezing or thereabouts (such as the display showing an orange snowflake and the a red one at 0°). Even more bizarrely, if you start the car up in temperatures less than 3° then there is no warning at all.

Even though I am tall it is impossible to tell where the corners and sides of the car are, making parking a nightmare. Parking sensors are a must (only an optional extra on the basic CRV) and you have to believe that the sensors are doing their job and not cunningly seducing you into a minor prang situation.

Compared to my old (pre 2007) CRV the boot is tiny. The new CRV has lost 6 inches of height, the rears seats lean backwards into the boot space and the rear windscreen leans forwards. To me. this is the biggest disappointment, made all the worse for having read about how the new CRV has so much more boot space than its rivals and that being an important factor in deciding to replace the old CRV with the new one . Part of the weekly routine used to be loading up the car with four massive bags of gardening r****** to take to the tip – now I will struggle to get just two bags into the boot.

On the old CRV to fold down a rear seat you undid a catch and eased the seat forwards. To restore the seat to its normal position you simply lifted the seat back and it clicked into place. The new CRV is much cleverer. First you have to make sure there is nothing in the rear passenger footwell. Then you have to open the boot and pull on a strap (which presumably is connected by some prone-to-going-wrong sort of cord to the catch that used be on the old CRV). You can then put the rear seat down and automatically and cleverly the headrest drops and folds itself over and the seat squab drops into the footwell. To put the seat back up again you move it back into position and it clicks into place as before. However you now have to reach inside the car, twisting upwards, to put the headrest into place. Assuming that your back is still serviceable, you now have to bend down and lift the seat squab back into place. Extraordinarily clever but has anything useful been achieved? No.

In wet conditions the rear of the car is covered in muddy spray (never a problem with the old CRV). That has two consequences. The first is the continual monitoring of the rear windscreen and the wiper – not a big issue but it detracts from the so-called driving experience. The other problem is that whenever you open the boot you end up with one or two dirty fingers. How could anything so trivial be a cause of complaint you may ask yourself. Well, ask yourself: having got two dirty fingers, what do you do next? And the next time. And the time after that….

The old CRV averaged 28.8mpg in its last three months and that was typical of the mpg throughout its life. The new CRV has so far (1600 miles) averaged 31.6mpg. (Petrol in both cases.) An improvement certainly but nothing shattering. I would much rather have 28.8 mpg, a car that can keep up effortlessly on the motorway and doesn't notice hills and which has steering that I can feel and understand.

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