Summary:
Bought The New Honda City-S after test driving quiet a few cars in the category (earlier car: ikon). The test drive was one of the most satisfactory once. Has a good balance between driving pleasure and easy maneuverability. Its way ahead of the previous (2nd) gen City and kudo’s to honda for that.
But this is definitely not value for money car and what inclined us to choose this was we would be one of the first one’s driving the car around in the city (i know, may not make a lot of sense, but alas...). For the same price or below the number of accessories the competitor car comes with is much more ex: alloy wheels (can u believe a 9lakh+ car does not have alloys).
Kindly note this review is coming in after more than 4 months of usage and hence is quiet mature one.
Space:
Not much to write here. Honda is known to create a lot of space and a thumbs up here
Fuel Consumption:
Now what does one expect from a Honda. Definitely fuel economy. This was one of the disappointments. The mileage the car returns is a little above 10kmpl. This is what my Ikon returns too but thatz like 5 years old with an enginer which is probably couple of decades old. The multimeter display of the mileage is not accurate and bloats up the figure by about 15%. So don’t feel too happy looking at those figures.
Comfort:
Where there is space there is comfort. Also the seats are shaped very well and provide great support. Though the centre seat on the rear is just decent due to the droppable hand rest. Quiet a lot of holders has been provided to put things into and the door pockets are also of usable size, a rarity in most cars.
The music system (not sure where else to categorize this) is where it dissapoints. Its one thing to say that its furture generation and hence there is a very friendly ipod interface But another thing to not support installation of a simple DC player. Earlier it was such a simple affair to add new music like a new movie songs to my car music library. Just burn a disc and put it in the car. You can just borrow CD’s when you are driving more than one car on a trip to keep exchanging music b/w the cars. All that is gone. And the investment to have music in the car shoots up big time.
Reliability:
Yes I have rated it too low. What does a customer expect when he pays almost a million bucks for a car. Atleast a peace of mind if not great satisfaction everytime you use the product. Now a lot of things like the engine response, the comfort of seating does make you happy when you travel, but as soon as there is a hump on the road, your heart will be hurt. The car has a very low clearance and this time when I dropped my car for service I had them lift it up to check the underneath. There were atleast 5+ different places where the car was scraped and that is definitely not nice to see. If I had a good idea of this at the begining trust me, I would not have bought this car just for this one reason!
You drive the car at 0.1 kmph and if the hump or ditch is of considerable size (which is not tough to find) then you are sure to scrape the bottom. The problem is created not just because of the low clearance but also because the front and rear wheels are spaced much farther than the other cars which pronounces it even more.
Looks:
Are specific to people but in my opinion looks great and I think most of the junta would agree so.
Suggestion:
Don’t buy it. The floor scraping problem is really something which will hurt you badly (2 more of our friends have it and everyone is worried about it). For a car as expensive as this to live with this kind of a problem every time you take it out is not worth it. If Honda fixes it then may be you can take a re-look. Hope they work on the mileage factor as well.