Road Test: Honda Brio 1.2 Comfort

“A young, hip and relatively cheap Honda… by George, what is this world coming to?” Ray Leathern explores the new, Indian-built, Honda Brio.

I was surprised to discover recently that in the Interbrand list of Top Ten Best Automotive Brands in 2012, Honda was ranked 4th. After a rather dismal year of slow recovery after Tsunamis, warehouse fires, economic downturns, Japanese currency fluctuations, the disappointment of the 2012 Honda Civic sedan and hatchback, the Interbrand listing would suggest that Honda wasn’t too badly impacted. Interbrand believes the Japanese manufacturer is still worth $17.2-billion. That’s a figure big enough to rank it ahead of Hyundai, Nissan and Ford, while placing it 21st overall for any brand in the world. Just to give you an idea, that’s higher than brand giants like, Ikea, Pepsi and Budweiser.

How is that even possible? Have I been missing something in amongst the stodgy styling and ageing engines of the Hondas I’ve been driving? Then I remembered that Honda makes motorcycles and scooters for the Fast East. In India alone, Honda have three factories dedicated to two-wheeled transportation and they’re in the process of finishing a fourth. With bikes like the 110 cc Honda Dream Yugo selling in the region of 3 000 units a month in India alone and the infamous Honda Super Cub that passed 60 million sold mark last April, Honda is a household name over there. This popularity only appears to be gathering pace.

So what about an Indian-built Honda car then? Is it not time we get over ourselves in the thinking that anything from the East is automatically inferior to something from the West, or the Far-Far East? I’ll let the Honda Brio be the judge of that. Styling-wise the small Honda Brio looks tip-top. Showing a proud and stubby frontend, the Brio has a pair of well-proportioned headlights alongside the compact grille. The chromed Honda ‘H’ displays prominently and brightly in the centre of the grille,  and I’d imagine a first time car owner would be chuffed to bits when this rather lovable face greeted him / her in the driveway each morning before work.

Then in profile you begin to notice that the Brio may be running short on styling ideas. The Brio is quite a tall car in fact, taller than these images might lead you to believe, and not all that sporty as a result. Two styling lines run along the lower skirt profile and atop the front and rear door handle line, both of which perpetuate this taller stance. The wheels are not alloys, but in fact 14-inch steel items with plastic hubcaps and they are wrapped in rubber from a tyre manufacturer I’m not familiar with; MRF. Oh no, I remember seeing that brand on Sachin Tendulkar’s cricket bat not so long ago.

Then there is an old-fashioned radio antennae on the driver’s side that you must pull up manually for the AM / FM radio to pick up any reception. When it is up, it makes your Honda Brio look like a toy walky-talky. The rear doors have a plastic section where a cleverly hidden door handle could easily have resided. Instead of executing this clever touch, however, the space is left empty and the rear doors still have conventional handles.

At the rear Honda have taken a leaf out of the Toyota Aygo’s book and made a one-piece, painted, glass boot opening. On the Toyota Aygo, however, it feels really well engineered. On the Honda Brio it thuds closed with a vulnerable, glassy, ping and the rear window has no rear-wiper either. The rear bumper itself is too high as well, taking up too much visual attention of the rear end. This is ironic because the Brio’s boot is actually quite small. The taller rear end, cheap glass boot and gumdrop taillights, almost seem to have been thrown together in a very matter-of-fact sort of way. It’s a disappointment, especially because the front of the car is so good.

On the inside I’m happy to report things settle back into a soothing Honda familiarity. The brown and beige interior isn’t as funky as you’ll find on some competitor cars in this sector, but the seats are simple, functional and small enough to allow a lot of space in the back for rear passengers. The stereo system doesn’t have a CD-player, but rather a connector for your USB / AUX music device. Joy of joys, the steering wheel has audio controls and you get electrically operated windows, air conditioning and a trip computer telling you your average fuel consumption. The Brio comes standard with anti-lock brakes (ABS), electronic brakeforce distribution (EBD) and two front airbags.

There is a refreshing pragmatism to the interior and this makes living with the Brio everyday easy as a result. There was something about the position of the rear view mirror on the windshield that occasionally unsettled my peripheral vision, however. Perhaps the driver sits a bit too close to the windshield or the mirror is a particular shape that always catches the eye’s attention, but I did find it a bit of a nuisance.

Perhaps that had everything to do with the fact that there was always another car bearing down on me in my rear view mirror. As you might imagine, a small city car that’s built in India is hardly going to be the finest driving machine Honda will ever create. It isn’t the worst car they’ve made either. It actually has a very non-descript driving attitude. It’s kind of just 3.6 m of Honda, nothing more, nothing less. The name ‘Brio’ is derived from the Italian word for ‘cheerfulness’, ‘joy’ or ‘vigour’, however, I covered well over a 1 000 km in the little Honda and the most I can report is that it wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t exciting either.

The engine beneath the cute V-shaped bonnet is a 4-cylinder, 1.2-litre i-VTEC unit, which produces 65 kW and 109 Nm of torque. Peak torque arrives at 4 500 r/min and peak power at 6 000 r/min. If you’re not interested in thrashing around at full-throttle, it is difficult to attain the peaky levels the engine wants to perform at. The gear ratios are far apart on the manual gearbox too, meaning after you’ve built up a good head of steam in second or third, when you shift up a gear, all the impetus is lost again.

The 4-cylinder is not the most tuneful i-VTEC Honda has ever produced either, so the Brio is hardly going to encourage you to keep your foot-in-it all the way to rev counter’s red line. This is in contrast to the 3-cylinder engine in the Toyota Aygo, which just begged to be bouncing of its rev-limiter. 0 – 100 km/h is achieved in 12 seconds and you should consume 5.6 L/100 km on the combined cycle.

I’m not a particularly aggressive driver over the holiday season, due to the increased traffic and perennial reminders of South Africa’s road accident death rates. That’s why I like to test small cars over the December break and I like to drive as economically as possible. I therefore always choose to fall in line on the highway, wait my turn calmly in traffic and drive slower than I might otherwise.

Even avoiding this typical cut-and-thrust, the Honda Brio showed itself to be a little too slow for my liking. A trundle up a hill often required a snap downshift to fourth gear on the 5-speed manual and then, on the downhill section that followed, you could feel some mechanical loss through the drivetrain. The Brio won’t coast downhill without throttle, you need to constantly stab at it to keep it moving. This isn’t the end of the world, but it tells me the drivetrain could be a little better.

In conclusion then, I like the Honda Brio for its rather lovable front end styling. I like the interior quality and the niceties of the equipment. I could do with a redesign of the Brio rear end and I’m neither blown away, nor put off, by the shoulder-shrugging performance. That’s before we get to the pricing.

This Comfort specification Honda Brio with a manual gearbox costs just R119 800. At that sort of price, this Honda is a great value proposition and, if you don’t want to shift gear yourself, a 5-speed automatic version will only cost an extra R10 000. The Honda Brio isn’t quite perfect just yet, but as their first attempt at a small, affordable car, Honda has a real no-frills, no-fuss contender on their hands.

What we like…

• Good quality interior that plays USBs and has air conditioning.
• Cute, well styled front end.
• It’s a Honda for less than R120 000.

What we would like…

• A bigger fuel tank.
• A better boot and rear end arrangement.
• A proper radio antenna.

Photo Credit: Matteo Conti

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