Two weeks ago, while you were at work, I was 36 000 feet in the air en route from Mauritius to Cape Town reliving some of the better moments from the last few weeks. The time when the BMW Z4 stuck a wheel on the gravel and made earthquake noises as I wrestled to regain control. The time when I executed a perfect power slide in a Jaguar XF.
Then I arrived at Cape Town International to find, sitting in the early morning Cape Town sunshine, a Honda Accord.
Oh dear. This was a bit like sending a food critic to the best restaurant in the world and presenting him with a Big Mac. It looked all wrong, parked among the Range Rover sports and the Ferraris and the hyper-tuned Masserati’s. It looked a bit dull.
With little enthusiasm I eased out onto the N2 and, with my mind in neutral, set off to for home.
The thing is, though, that after a short while it became screamingly obvious that despite the girl-next-door looks and the 2.4 litres of V-TEC-power, this car was head and shoulders above everything else I’d driven out there.
Where a Jaguar or a BMW shouts and waves its arms about, the Honda just gets on with the job of going fast and telegraphing messages to the seat of your pants and your fingertips, instantly and with no ambiguity at all.
Honda has massaged the Accord for the 2011 model year and came up with normal cosmetic tweaks — and a notable boost in fuel economy.
The changes are part of what Honda calls MMC — minor model change — customary about halfway through a vehicle's life. A fully redesigned Accord is due as a 2013 model
Honda is pitching the new Accord as a 'quality' car. That means neither mass-market nor premium, but somewhere in between. Trouble is, every carmaker is trying to head ‘upmarket’, but if everyone does it we'll be back where we started. Anyway, everything fits together beautifully and moves smoothly, and the glovebox is very nicely flock-lined, but the value is in the underskin engineering and the driving qualities that flow therefrom. That would be a very Honda-ish approach, putting priority on the mechanicals where much of the buying public would fail to notice just so the engineers can sleep soundly.
The instruments light up, in backlit bright red, as soon as you open the door. The decorative motif is 'technical metal', the ambience dark and sexy. Into the first of six gears, off we move with the engine quiet but metallically Honda-edged. Underfoot is a drive-by-wire throttle, crisp and smooth apart from an abruptness when throttling-off.
The Honda Accord revs with zeal but you don't have to hit the heights; it's very driveable. But that is not what makes the Accord, against indications so far, special. You need some corners to discover where its salvation lies.
I'm going to be a bit daring here, and say that the Accord may just be the sweetest-handling front-wheel-drive sedan you can currently buy.
As a driver’s car, then, this is yet another winner and I’d buy one in a heart beat.
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