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Our week – and family road trip – with the 2016 Honda HR-V

Car Reviews

Our week – and family road trip – with the 2016 Honda HR-V

Driving all over the country, especially in Texas, you’re sure to see your fair share of Hondas on the road. After driving the 2015 Honda Civic last year, I was more than excited to get to try out the 2016 Honda HR-V AWD EX-L. I know you’re probably thinking, “what do those 2 cars have in common and why were you so excited to give it a try?” After reading this review, I hope you see the positives that Honda rolled out with the HR-V that had me excited about writing the review.

2016 Honda HR-V by txGarage

First, as always, looks! At first glance, everyone including myself thought this was a CR-V. As a matter a fact, I had to do a double take when picking the car up. This 5 door compact crossover was more than exciting and as Honda said, “highly anticipated.” Now, you’re probably wondering why is this crossover anticipated? If you’re not a Honda follower, you might just pass this as a smaller version of the CR-V. Many that I spoke to about this vehicle couldn’t get in their heads why Honda would even get in the compact crossover market with this. After reading this quote from carsdirect.com you might understand as I do now. “Compact crossovers recently surpassed midsize sedans as the bestselling class of vehicle.” That being said, we think sleekness of this design was a great out of the gate swing for Honda. It’s very stylish but you can tell from every angle that this is a Honda all the way.

2016-Honda-HR-V-txGarage-0252016-Honda-HR-V-txGarage-0112016-Honda-HR-V-txGarage-008

As for the rest of the vehicle, inside and some other exterior features:

Likes:

Needs Improvements:

There were only a few moments where I noticed the CVT (Continuously Variable Transmission) was a bit slow and not responsive to the demand of the throttle. It just seemed to rev at some unnecessary RPMs. This was the only point of comparison to the Civic that I was looking forward to because I remember recalling the CVT of the Civic and being really shocked at how much improvement it needed.

This one is small compared to other nitpicks I have had, but when you climb in the cockpit of this adventurous vehicle, you realize “where do I put my phone?” The shifter and ginormous cup holders take up so much space. There’s a compartment under the centered dash where I think they intended such things to be placed on a road trip. This also hammers away as a nod to Honda’s safety measures – keeping phones away as a road distraction! So I guess in a way this could be a positive.

Overall, for me, it’s really nice to have more ‘likes’ then ‘dislikes’ with a Honda product. As excited as I was for this HR-V I was actually pleasantly surprised with the price tag. Even the EX-L model that we had would only cost you close to $25,800. And I say that with an excited tone because the cousin model, the CR-V, starts out at $23,000 and goes up. I think, if you can get into a crossover with as good a gas mileage as the CR-V without the sticker price, that’s a plus! To me there’s just not that much size difference for a small family between the all-new HR-V and the revamped CR-V. The bigger the family though, you might want to spring for the CR-V! With that, go Honda!

Justin is a passionate family man who loves design, technology, and anything involving the outdoors. Justin also writes for Hunting Guru where he publishes product reviews, advice, and general hunting stories. Justin is an Associate Editor at txGarage and played a vital role in designing and developing the website.

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