Honda India Imports Civic Diesel for R&D; Any Launch Plans?

Our Indian version of Honda Civic was one car that can still come and make a few other cars look outdated! Such futuristically brilliant design it was! Placed right between the City and the flagship Accord, the car was a large seller in the D-segment initially.

However, it lost its sheen because of Honda’s petrol-only love that time and relatively higher prices!

Meanwhile, new Civics were introduced internationally, which received very lukewarm responses in terms of design. Honda has continuously declined Civic’s re-entry into India (a few weeks back they talked about Accord’s launch in India), but in an interesting piece of info we have landed upon, it must leave everyone scratching their heads!

According to Zauba.com, Honda has imported a left hand drive Civic diesel in India from UK for R&D purposes. The engine details mentioned point out to the 1.6L i-DTEC diesel motor which is the basis of our India-specific 1.5L IDTEC motor. Price mentioned is close to 14 Lakhs, which is very much in the region where D-segment sedans are sold in India.

But the real question is – Is Honda really considering launching the new Civic in India with a diesel engine? This is surprising considering the fact that D-segment sedans are not doing particularly well in our country. This is because of the fact that C-segment sedans are growing in terms of features and people with a budget of 15 odd lakhs, do not generally mind adding some more dough and go for bigger flagships.

So, we are really skeptical about Civic’s re-entry into India unless Honda has some nice laid-out path charted up. But what we, for sure, know and understand is that the company will be launching the new Jazz sometime early next year, followed by the new 2015 Accord. Honda is also working on a compact SUV based on the Brio platform.

For the records, Civic in the United Kingdom is sold as a hatchback as well as a tourer. In the diesel avatar it gets the 1.6L Earth Dreams i-DTEC engine which has a displacement of 1,597 cc, producing a maximum power of 120PS at 4,000 rpm and a peak torque output of 300Nm at 2,000 rpm.  The car has a top speed of 223.70 kmph and can hit the ton in around 10 seconds.

And since there is no Civic saloon in UK, this may mean that Honda may just be carrying on tests for the diesel engine or considering the tourer for India (wild speculation!).