Honda’s 2012 Civic holds line on change

The new Honda Civic went on sale yesterday, ready to do battle in the newly competitive compact-car segment.

Assembled in Indiana, the Civic runs on an Ohio-made engine and transmission, with many other parts coming from Ohio-based suppliers.

Honda marked the release with a news conference at the New York International Auto Show.

“More than any other product, Civic has remained in touch from generation to generation with the needs of customers on a very personal level,” said John Mendel, Honda’s top sales executive in North America.

The new Civic has a sportier design and better fuel economy than the previous version, released in 2006. It is part of the increasingly competitive compact-car segment that includes the new Chevrolet Cruze, the redesigned Ford Focus and Hyundai Elantra, and the Toyota Corolla.

“The old Honda Civic was a really good car, and the new Civic pushes the envelope a little more — not a radical change,” said David Champion, director of automobile testing for Consumer Reports, speaking from the New York show.

The Civic is offered at a base price of $15,605 and a top price of $23,905 for a standard gasoline engine, and costs from $24,050 to $26,750 for a gasoline-electric hybrid.

Notably, Civic’s base price is lower than the Focus and Cruze, which start at $16,270 and $16,525, respectively.

But the base Civic sedan’s price, $15,805 for the DX trim level, doesn’t reflect what most customers will pay. The next step up is the LX sedan, which starts at $17,855.

“That bottom-end Civic is … a model leader to get people into the showroom,” Champion said.

On average, the new Civic is $33 more expensive than the equivalent trim levels in the model’s previous generation, an increase so small that it’s “pretty amazing,” Mendel said.

The sedan with an automatic transmission gets 28miles per gallon in the city, 39 mpg on the highway and 32 mpg combined, all of which represent nearly a 10 percent improvement from the previous version.

Honda is launching a new ad campaign to support the Civic with the following tag line: “To each their own.” The campaign shows the wide variety of options available and the many different types of customers who buy the vehicle. To highlight the latter point, a new television ad shows a ninja, a zombie and a monster getting into Civics.

“We’re talking about perhaps the broadest and most diverse customer demographic in our industry,” Mendel said.

Critics are praising the Civic as a competent entry that retains much of the charm of the previous-generation model.

“The styling is evolutionary, compared with the more aggressive Elantra and Focus,” said Mark Rechtin, writing for Automotive News.