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HondaCivic

The small car that met America's emissions law without a catalytic converter.

Photo: © M 93 · CC BY-SA 3.0 de

The story

A defining chapter in Honda history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Honda Civic, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Honda's first cars were tiny kei machines, the N600 and Z600, charming but marginal outside Japan and built to a set of Japanese tax rules that meant nothing anywhere else. The Civic of 1972 was the company's first serious attempt at a product designed for the world: a transverse-engined front-wheel-drive hatchback with a 1,169 cc four, independent suspension at all four corners, rack and pinion steering, and interior space that embarrassed cars a size above it. Nothing about the layout was unprecedented, but the execution was unusually tight, and the timing was close to perfect. It reached export markets just as the 1973 oil crisis turned small efficient cars from a compromise into an urgent requirement.

1989-1991 Honda Civic GL hatchback 02 · OSX · Public domain

Design and engineering

What turned it from a good small car into a significant one was CVCC. The US Clean Air Act required drastic reductions in exhaust emissions, and Detroit's collective position was that the standards were unachievable without catalytic converters, which at the time demanded unleaded fuel that was not yet widely distributed. Honda's answer was combustion-chamber design rather than after-treatment: a cylinder head with a small auxiliary pre-chamber fed a rich mixture through a third valve, which ignited reliably and then lit a very lean charge in the main chamber, burning cleanly enough to meet the 1975 standards with no catalyst at all. To demonstrate that this was a general solution rather than a quirk of a very light car, Honda bought a Chevrolet Vega, fitted CVCC heads to its engine, and showed that it passed too.

1987 Honda Civic GL hatchback · OSX · Public domain

1993-1995 Honda Civic GLi 3-door hatchback 01

In production

That single piece of engineering did more for Honda's American standing than any amount of advertising could have. It positioned a company with no history in cars as the technically serious one, embarrassed manufacturers many times its size, and put Civics in the driveways of buyers who had never previously considered a Japanese product. The reputation for engine engineering that Honda still trades on dates from this moment.

1993-1995 Honda Civic GLi 3-door hatchback 01 · OSX · Public domain

Legacy

The model then simply kept going, and kept getting larger. It moved from subcompact to compact in 1991, added wagons, sedans, coupés and, between 1983 and 2005, four-wheel-drive versions. The Si and then the VTEC engines gave it a performance reputation that the Type R, from 1997, made explicit, while cheap high-revving engines in light bodies made the Civic the foundation of import tuning culture on several continents. It has been in continuous production since 1972 and built almost everywhere Honda operates, and it remains the car most people picture when they hear the name.

At a glance

The facts that define it.

Produced

1972–present

Body

2-door fastback sedan/saloon

Technical specification

The Civic, in detail.

Production: 1972–present
Class: Subcompact car (1972–1991); Compact car (1991–present)
Body style: 2-door fastback sedan/saloon (1972–1979); 4-door fastback sedan (1973–1978); 3-door hatchback (1972–2011); 5-door hatchback (1977–1983, 2000–2021); 5-door station wagon (1974–2006,efn; The station wagon variant of the th
Layout: Front-engine, front-wheel-drive; Front-engine, four-wheel-drive (1983–2005)
Manufacturer: Honda

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