Model:
Honda Civic 2.2 iCTDi
Would suit:
"Red Dwarf" fans.
Price:
£18 l;100 (about R203 000)
Performance:
203km/h, 0-100km/h 8.6sec.
Economy:
5.13 litres/100km.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the car of the future... as seen from 1988. This is the new Honda Civic: a car that looks like a 20-year-old styling exercise from a studio in Shinjuku but is in fact built in Swindon, England, today and planned for release in South Africa in the second half of 2006.
It has a scarab-like shape with concealed rear doors (all the better to make you think it's a coupé), a double-decker fascia that looks like a Wurlitzer jukebox designed by Bang & Olufsen and triangular twin exhaust pipes built into the rear valence (a trick first seen with the "rocket ship" styling of American cars of the 1950s).
Each door release is a floating lever in a kite-shaped recess; when you pull it, you half expect it to make one of those sci-fi "shhhh-um" door-opening noises. And to top it all there is the rear spoiler, integral to, and horizontally bisecting, the rear window so that it has glass above and below.
It knocks the new Citroën C6's rear window - which manages to be both concave and convex - into a cocked hat.
I tried the top-of-the-range, 2.2-litre diesel. There's the usual gravel-in-a-tin-bucket rattle at idle but a cheery turbo whistle takes over at speed.
That used to be a turbo's way of reminding you not to overtake anything suddenly as it wouldn't have time to spool up the power and you'd be left panicking in front of oncoming traffic but the Civic's thrust comes almost immediately.
It's a fun drive - light, agile, yet with a splendidly comfortable ride. It is as perky as its chief rival, the Focus, and thanks to those Space 1999 aesthetics, considerably more charismatic.
Honda is one of the great carmakers of our time which, for me, made the brittle cheapness of some of the plastic bits tantamount to a betrayal.
Messy collage
That spangly silver, plastic petrol flap is an abomination, for instance, and the steering wheel annoyed me from the start because my unusually short arms (a sign of intelligence, I maintain) couldn't reach it.
The wheel is a messy collage of leather, plastic, various buttons (wheels, flaps and pushers) and, inexplicably, a tiny filet of mesh on the middle spoke. Bizarre.
The fascia has a scattering of knobs and buttons, some duplicating other controls just centimetres away, and a low roof that's definitely going to result in serious hair issues for the tall among us.
It's so wide
This new Civic is lower and shorter than the last model, but it feels disconcertingly broad. I spent some minutes waiting in traffic behind an Audi A8 on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice during the launch and I'd swear I was in the wider car.
None of these faults should put you off buying a Civic if the look floats your boat but I feel duty bound to warn you that it will probably all start to look very dated right about... now.