Prius Gen4 vs Honda Civic 11th Gen (e:HEV)

I was asked in another thread to give a write up of the Honda Civic 11th Gen e:HEV.

I owned a 4th Gen Prius for 6 years prior to jumping ship. My hand was forced due to Toyota deciding not to release the 5th Gen Prius in the UK. A month after I received my new Honda, they reversed that decision and are now going to sell it in the UK at some point. Oh well!

So this is a direct comparison of the Honda Civic 11th Gen e:HEV (2023) Advance model to a Toyota Prius 4th Gen (2017) Excel model. Both of these trim levels are the highest available in the UK.

I've owned the Honda Civic for 3 months and around 1,800 miles.

Pros:

• The Civic is much more fun to drive. It has considerably faster acceleration (0-60 in around 7 seconds advertised, but you can do it in 6 if the traction battery is reasonably full). You really feel the greater acceleration at low speeds. I suspect the electric motor is much more powerful than the Prius, but I haven't checked this.
• Adaptive Headlights are just awesome. They're effectively on high beam all the time and different segments of the headlights are turned off so as not to dazzle other road users. You can see these square shadows around oncoming vehicles. It just works flawlessly. By comparison, the Prius had just Automatic High Beams which would turn the high beams on or off in their entirety, but it was so bad I couldn't use it. It would take upwards of 10 seconds sometimes to turn off when an oncoming vehicle came into view, seriously dazzling oncoming vehicles.
• You can turn the headlights off if you're parked, at night, with the car switched on. As soon as you put it into D the headlights turn back on.
• Heated Steering wheel.
• Android Auto (works brilliantly). It has Apple too but not tested that.
• Fast built in navigation, which has over-the-air free lifetime updates, but I mostly use Android Auto.
• Lane Keep Assist that keeps in you in perfectly the middle of the lane, rather than bouncing you off the sides of the lanes. I can basically let the car completely drive itself, for the most part, other than junctions and traffic lights.
• "Individual" driving mode. On the Prius I had Eco, Normal, and Sport mode. You get those three too on the Civic, but also Individual which allows you to choose Normal/Sport steering, Eco/Normal/Sport accelerator response, Eco/Normal/Sport dials, and Normal/Sport engine sound (see below).
• Engine Sound? I'm going to put this as both a pro and con as I'm still in two minds whether I love or hate this... So when in Sport mode, the Civic creates a fake engine sound and plays it through the speakers. I'm not kidding. It makes it sound like a modified car with a noisy exhaust. It also does fake shifting with the ICE's rev level to simulate gear changes. It's fun, but it's a gimmick, and you can't turn off the fake shifting at all. The sound only appears in sport mode, but you must enjoy/suffer the sound if you want to use Sport mode.
• Configurable dials - You can change the usual circular dials to vertical bars, freeing up space in the centre of the display for two panels of various types of information. You get that with the circular dials too, but the info is smaller.
• Washer jets built into the wiper blades. I thought I'd hate this, and the fact the washer tank is only 2 litres in size, but in fact this is awesome. You need MUCH less liquid to clean the windscreen, and it does it in one swish. All of the water is in front of the blades, rather than half of it spraying off after it hits the glass. I find myself refilling the reservoir less often than my Prius, despite it being 2 litres instead of 5 litres.
• Rear window heater that actually covers the whole area that the wiper blade covers. On the Prius, the top 1/4 of the window isn't heated, which means the end 1/4 of the wiper hits frost in the winter, even if you have the heated window on.
• Front doors that you can open without the bottom corner hitting the ground on roads with high kerbs or big cambers.
• Powerful aircon. My Prius struggled to cool air much, or quickly, throughout its life. Every car I've ever owned had considerably more powerful aircon.
• No B mode. I don't know what the Civic does differently, but it sounds like a much more "normal" car when going down hill for prolonged distances. The Prius would rev up scarily high once the battery got full. The Civic just sounds like it does anywhere else. So there's no need for a B mode.

Cons:

• The Civic isn't as economical. I'm getting 40MPG (UK gallons) in the Civic according to the car's computer, versus around 55MPG average in the Prius. My journey to work, which is downhill, used to allow me to get 128MPG in the Prius. Best I can get in the Civic is 60MPG on the same journey.
• No "Low Speed Automatic Braking" (forward automatic braking above 5MPH works the same as the Prius). The Prius would stop me if I was slowly going forwards or backwards into an object. Civic advertised this as a feature, but it's not present. Complained to Honda and they gave me £1,000 as way of an apology and have updated their websites accordingly.
• No EV mode. With the Civic the car always decides whether to use the ICE or Electric or both - there's no button to make EV preferential like there is in the Prius.
• Fake shifting (see above). It simulates gear changes via manipulating the revs of the ICE. On the Prius you could max out the revs, and hence the power output of the ICE, and keep it there if you fully depressed the accelerator. On the Civic it does this fake gear shifting, so the ICE drops down to, say, 80% revs every time it hits 100% as if you'd changed into a higher gear. You can turn this off via fully turning off Traction Control, but I want that on. I prefer the whiny continuously variable drone of the Prius engine, although I accept I'm possibly in a minority (although maybe not on here).
  
• The boot/trunk lid doesn't go up very high. I'm constantly banging my forehead on it when it's open and I lean in to get stuff out of it.

I do love the Civic, it really is a great car overall, and I have no regrets. However, I suspect I'd would still go with the 5th Gen Prius, had it been an option at the time, assuming it had Android Auto and is a bit faster than the 4th Gen. I miss the level of hybrid refinement the Prius has too. I think the new 5th Gen looks better than the Civic as well. Of course there's no price in the UK for a 5th gen, so it's hard to say for certain either way.

 

Yes it's a split 1/3 + 2/3 folding rear seats, same as my 4th Gen Prius. In terms of practicality, I chose the Civic as it was very similar to the Prius and I knew I could fit both kids, the wife, and all the stuff we need to go on holiday in it. It's very similar in terms of storage space.

There are versions of this Civic that aren't Hybrid, but the default model in the UK is Hybrid only.

I agree with these annoying proprietary acronyms. Honda are calling this an e:HEV (Electric Hybrid Electric Vehicle) to differentiate it from most other forms of Hybrids (HEVs). The Prius, for example, is essentially an ICE with a supporting electric motor that produces 53 Nm of torque. The Honda is more like an Electric Vehicle, that produces 315 Nm torque, with a supporting ICE that's used mostly as a generator.

There are conditions (i.e. very gentle acceleration and low speeds) when you can run a 4th Gen Prius in purely electric mode. Conversely, on the Civic, the only the electric motor is connected to the wheels unless you're pressing the accelerator pretty hard, at which point the ICE provides supplementary power.

By comparison, the 2023 Tesla Model S produces 420 to 575 Nm of torque from its electric motor, and a Nissan Leaf 320 Nm. So it's in the ballpark of other full electric vehicles, but not quite a Tesla.

At first this confused me, as I felt the ICE was running a LOT of the time compared to the Prius, and the ICE would come on to charge the battery even when the battery level was quite high. I felt this was wrong and wasn't leaving much space for regen, but in fact needs to be this way so it has enough stored power in the battery to provide most of the drive power as it can use it 6x faster than the Prius. It just works differently. The amount of regen you get before the friction brakes activate is also much higher than the Prius - I guess due to that more powerful motor. I would say you have to press the brake "harder than you would normally require in most situations" for the friction brakes to come on.

I looked up the battery size and it's 1.05 kWh on the Civic versus 0.75 kWh on the standard (not the Prime) 4th Gen, so comparable I guess.