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New Civic Tourer marks estate comeback for Honda

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13 August 2013

Honda Civic Tourer
The Tourer will only be built in the UK and will be pitched against user-chooser company cars like the Golf estate

The Honda Civic Tourer, to be built only at Swindon alongside the Civic hatchback and CR-V SUV, is expected to account for 25-30 per cent of Civic sales in Europe overall; slightly less in the UK, where the C segment estate sector is not quite so popular.

Killham also claims a technology ‘first’ for the Tourer in that it is equipped with adaptive suspension – settings ‘comfort’, ‘normal’ and ‘dynamic’- but at the rear of the car only.

The thinking behind this is that significant load variations on an estate car occur overwhelmingly at the rear – bicycles hung on a rack well behind the tailgate, for example – and that the system can provide 80 per cent of the ride and handling benefits of a full four-wheel adaptive suspension, but at significantly lower cost.  

Reduced weight is also said to be to the benefit of fuel economy.

Honda’s UK sales currently are biased heavily towards the retail sector as opposed to company car fleet and SME business car users.

Honda Civic Tourer
The Tourer has clever rear suspension to compensate for heavy loads – like bike racks – carried behind the back wheels

Less than 30 per cent of overall UK sales are to business users of all types, although the proportion among Civics is slightly higher. However the sheer utility aspects – some quite ingenious – of the Tourer are raising Honda executives’ hopes of achieving conquest sales against entrenched rivals like the Focus in both SME company car and retail markets.

Lee Wheeler, head of corporate sales at Honda, said: “For the SME company car market we will be pitching the Tourer as a user chooser choice against the Volkswagen Golf and Skoda Octavia, rather than the fleet market Focus and Astra.”

The Tourer is claimed to have 640 cubic litres of load space with the rear seats raised and the load-hiding tonneau in place.

‘Magic’ rear seats fold flat into the floor, or up into the roof

However this rises to just under 1700 litres loaded to the roof lining and with a boot floor ‘lid’ removed to reveal an additional cavernous underfloor load space.

What Honda officially describes as “magic” rear seats which fold fully flat into the floor, or can be folded up into the roof, are significant contributors to the load space flexibility. This has been achieved in a vehicle which is only 235mm longer than the Civic 5-door hatchback.

The Honda Civic Tourer will be launched initially with two engines shared with other Civics: 1.6 litre, 120bhp turbodiesel, and the more powerful but now ageing 1.8 litre VTEC  petrol unit.

Intriguingly, mounted on the interior side of the top central section of the windscreen is a black box with a trio of forward-facing apertures of which Honda will say only that they are intended as “driver technology aids”, the details of which are expected to be disclosed at the Frankfurt motor show.

Prices for the Honda Civic Tourer are not expected to be announced until towards the end of the year.

The Honda Civic Tourer was first shown as a concept at the Geneva Show earlier this year

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Matt Morton

Matt Morton

Matt Morton is an automotive content writer for Business Car Manager

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