Clever ‘Magic Seats’, a blissfully button-heavy dashboard… and an infuriating transmission
Like many others, I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that most cars on the road today look exactly the same. Even as a card-carrying member of the motoring nerd community, I often have to squint to spot the subtle differences that mark out, say, a Cupra from a Citroën – and there’s no category I struggle with more than the B-segment crossover.
A Toyota C-HR could be a Nissan Juke from a distance, and I’ve confidently misidentified a Volkswagen T-Roc as a Renault Captur on a murky evening. The humble Honda HR-V has always stood out from the crowd, though. As it should: few seem to remember that it holds rank alongside the Matra Rancho as patient zero of the crossover curse.
Should your memory need jogging, it arrived in 1999 as a three-door SUV built on the platform of the Honda Logo (when did you last see one of them, eh?), with space shuttle-esque looks that seemed more at home in the streets of London than the lanes of Wales.
Now in its third generation (the second one, based on the Honda Jazz, was a perfectly fine car but no trailblazer like its predecessor), the HR-V comes exclusively with a front-wheel-drive hybrid powertrain, badged e:HEV. And it has just been treated to a mid-life update to enhance its design appeal still further, receiving a less rounded grille, a reworked front bumper, sharper headlights and some extra body shaping, particularly down the sides.
The Urban Grey Pearl example that has just turned up outside my house is in range-topping Advance Style Plus trim, differing from the standard Elegance by way of an electric tailgate, a heated steering wheel, adaptive headlights and a panoramic roof, among other niceties such as a wireless phone charger and uprated audio.
It has been optioned with the Obscura Black Pack, meaning that the sharp seven-bar grille, sizeable mirrors and lower bumpers front and rear are finished in – you guessed it – black, rather than being body-coloured. Paired with the black roof (which is something every crossover seems to feature now), it puts the finishing touches to what is already a surprisingly good-looking car.
I love how those new headlights seem to poke out from under the bonnet and the Hofmeister – like kink where the C-pillar meets the bodywork. Other visual curiosities include three dots hidden in the rear light bar surround to act as reversing lights – a quirky but not overcomplicated solution to the problem of where to put the bulbs, which I like – and blue trim on the lower doors, which I can’t help thinking looks like someone has left the pre-delivery protection film on.
I like the interior even more. It’s refreshing to see a major manufacturer such as Honda forgo a screen-heavy approach: the 9.0in touchscreen in the HR-V is as large as I’d ever want one to be. On first impressions, the infotainment system is decent, being easy to navigate and quick to respond to your commands.
And the leftmost portion of the driver’s display can be customised to show just about anything you would want to know about the car, ranging from average journey speed to fuel economy, and has incredibly smooth graphics. Even more welcome is that the HR-V still has physical climate controls.
Yes, there are still some cars on sale in the UK in 2026 that don’t force you to try to navigate a tablet strapped to a dashboard in order to keep the cabin at a comfortable temperature. They’re nice to use too, being helpfully ridged so your fingers don’t slip off. Everything else related to the climate is controlled by individual buttons along the same interior line.
The cabin is full of materials that are pleasing to the eye and to the touch. Faux leather gives the dashboard and seats a bit of contrast, with the latter finished mostly in a soft fabric. I’ve long been an advocate of fabric seats over leather ones, which get too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.
It’s much the same in the capacious rear, where the bench consists of Honda’s Magic Seats – a clever design where the base can be folded up to create a massive extra storage area in the footwells. The boot is among the larger ones in this class, too.
Under the bonnet is a 1.5-litre four-cylinder atmo petrol engine with 106bhp, and a pair of electric motors bring the total output up to 129bhp, with power being fed to the wheels through an e-CVT. Those three letters strike fear into the heart of anyone who cares about cabin isolation, but I was impressed with the smoothness of the similar transmission in the Toyota Corolla hybrid I ran a while back, so it might not be a problem.
There is a lot to like about the HR-V, and the aim of running one over the coming months is to see if this minor update is enough to keep it shining in the sea of blandness that is the crossover market.
Motorway life
The HR-V has been racking up the miles lately and, by and large, I’m impressed with it as a motorway mile-muncher. But then I’d have been surprised if it wasn’t up to the job. I’ve always been happy enough in small cars on the motorway, so what’s the point in something this (relatively) big if it isn’t a nice place to watch the world slide by at 70mph?
The cabin is as quiet as you would hope at motorway speeds, with minimal audible intrusion from either the wind or the road. In fact, it feels almost as peaceful to be in as a BMW X3 – an impressive accolade for a car that’s half the price. Being a Honda, nothing rattles and nothing shakes, making it a pleasant place to be.
The ride at higher speeds is great too. It’s not bad at low speeds – bumps and potholes are soaked up well even around town – but once you hit the faster roads, it smooths out to a fantastic degree. In a world of paving-slab-stiff rides in modern cars, the HR-V is more akin to a soft pillow.
However, there is an elephant in the room – or, rather, under the bonnet. It’s the e-CVT gearbox’s fault, really. It seems to change its stepped gears almost at random, revving up the 1.5-litre four-pot in an aurally unpleasant way. As you would imagine, this gets old quite quickly, especially on hillier routes.
Living in South Wales, my drives to work almost always require me to cut around the north or south sides of the Welsh valleys, neither of which is a particularly flat drive from my sea-level home. The south-side route requires a long stint on the M4 over some sizeable hills and the north option means a drive on the freshly rebuilt and absolutely beautiful Heads of the Valleys road – the highest dual carriageway in Wales, peaking at over 400m above sea level. Whichever route I take, though, the HR-V voices its protest.
The noise of the engine tends to sound like someone is undertaking a heavy DIY session a couple of houses away and it is especially noticeable because everything else is so quiet. The curious petrolhead within me is intrigued by the way the car shifts between the gears that its series-parallel hybrid set-up allows it to create, but if I was less interested in such things, it would drive me to distraction.
I find the adaptive cruise control irritating too – though this is something that annoys me in almost everything I drive. When approaching slower-moving traffic, you have to move out what feels like far too early to avoid the car automatically applying the brakes. I’ve also had a few experiences where the radar appears to have become confused by the clouds of spray that lorries throw up in inclement weather, trying to stop me hitting what the system seems to misidentify as a solid object. Not good.
But in fairness, they’re pretty much the only things that irk me about this car in day-to-day use. The driving position is comfortable enough, the seats are superb and little details like the thin steering wheel and relatively small screen make long journeys fly by – all while achieving close to 50mpg.
Impressing passengers
I will admit that it’s actually proving quite hard to think of things to write about my HR-V. Not because it’s a poor car, by any means. In fact, it’s the opposite. It takes everything I throw at it happily in its stride.
I’ve racked up fewer miles than usual this month, but with just as much gear on board as it would normally have. In fact, on account of me needing to shed some more light on my photographic subjects now that the days are becoming ever shorter, it has been happily carting around a 4ft-long light stick, which is too wide for the boot but happy to cover the rear footwell from end to end-not something every car can handle.
A trip to Aberystwyth to support a friend’s ultimate Frisbee team (yes, it’s a real sport, I promise) proved its prowess once again. Although its boot is unable to take the aforementioned light stick (I’ve encountered very few boots that can, the Skoda Superb Estate we ran last summer being the last), it is more than capable of stowing five people’s massive sports bags for a weekend of chasing a flying plastic disc around a leisure centre.
My passengers were extremely complimentary about the HR-V, and indeed I’ve yet to find anyone with a bad word to say about it. Despite the fairly small dimensions, the cabin is nice both front and back, capable of sitting three adults side by side about as comfortably as can be expected.
As I swoop around town, palming the light steering wheel while traversing narrow streets and diving into tight parallel parking bays, I wonder why on earth you would need to buy a bigger car.
And the rear leg room really is impressive. Two of my friends are as lanky as they come and often end up squashed in the back of test cars, but both want me to keep this HR-V forever on account of them being able to properly stretch out. Honestly, it’s like a cut-price S-Class back there – an impression also given by the build quality.
The switchgear really is to be applauded. Honda certainly isn’t known for poor details or shoddy workmanship, but here its quality has been taken to a new level. The temperature control knobs and switches are well finished and perfectly weighted, to the point that I sometimes find myself changing the cabin temperature just to use them.
It’s not all sunshine and roses, mind you. Although the HR-V is perfectly happy on the road (it rides superbly, is very well isolated inside and has some lovely seats), there’s not much to say when it comes to driving dynamics. It’s possible to press on along country roads (the car’s relative narrowness helps here), but you would be incredibly hard-pressed to get any enjoyment out of doing so.
The car goes where you point it, but you get absolutely no sense of what it or the road is doing. Body roll is well contained, but you get very little sense of speed. Also not helping is the stepless transmission (called e-CVT but not really a CVT), even if it does deliver that hybrid power smoothly.
Obviously not everything has to be as engaging to drive as a flyweight mid-engined sports car, but after a couple of surprisingly engaging ‘normal’ long-termers (Suzuki Swift, I’m fondly looking back at you), I can’t help wishing the HR-V could give me a little bit of feedback when I’m on the road.
Even the aforementioned Superb proved itself to be surprisingly pleasant to thread along my favourite B-road, whereas this invokes no emotion whatsoever. At least it makes my own 2004 Toyota MR2 that little bit more satisfying to drive…
Unremarkable – in a good way
Some cars are so compelling that you just can’t stop waxing lyrical about them, seemingly being tailored to your personal use case like a Savile Row suit, while the fundamentally flawed cars of the world bother you enough to ensure you’re never short of writing inspiration.
The HR-V sits between those two extremes, being remarkable only for how entirely unremarkable it is. While such a car won’t do anything for the ardent driving enthusiast, it’s an undeniable fact that grey sells. And the HR-V is excellent at being grey – in more ways than its pearlescent paint. It does everything that the average customer could expect of it with no foibles, no irritations, no issues.
As a serial sports car owner, I admittedly feel apathetic towards the HR-V, because driving thrills are alien to it. The steering wheel just does what it says on the tin. The chassis handles well and is capable of being pushed down a B-road at a healthy lick.
Yet I’m also acutely aware that it’s comfortable, smooth, economical, well built, practical and entirely reliable – in stark contrast to some of my previous purchases. There is one thing that makes the mask slip, though, and it concerns a subject we have written about time and time again: the advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS.
Honda is, of course, required by European law (specifically the General Safety Regulations 2) to fit various ADAS in its latest cars, but it has implemented them poorly. They feel like afterthoughts. This is true of many manufacturers’ ADAS efforts, it must be said, but that isn’t much of an excuse.
I’ve probably had more journeys during which the HR-V’s adaptive cruise control system has freaked out like a timid horse at a parked car, a shadow or seemingly nothing at all than I have where it has worked successfully – all while the speed-limit reader picks up an entirely incorrect limit and assaults me with noisy bongs for daring to go above what it sees as a 40mph limit on a national-limit motorway.
This tech is a pain to turn off too, requiring navigation through sub-menus while the car is in park. At least I’m now so used to its protests that my ears have learned to tune them out.
Goodbye
Nearly 12,000 miles after this surprisingly good-looking SUV was dropped off, the people from Honda have returned to reclaim it.
So what have we learned in the intervening time? Well, first and foremost, it seems that I’m not the only one whose head has been turned by this oddly handsome machine. A number of people have commented-in a good way on the Honda’s stylish design, which is just sharp enough to stand out from the largely generic SUVs that populate our roads these days.
From its tidy diamond-cut alloy wheels to the grille that’s chunky enough to stand out without being offensive and the double-stack rear light bar that looks like something akin to the sticker font used on a Vauxhall Chevette HSR, the HR-V is an eye-catching thing.
That said, while I love the hidden rear door handle that’s neatly incorporated in the Hofmeister kink, passengers are less keen – I have lost count of the number of times someone has stared in puzzlement at the side of the car as they try to work out how to get in. Maybe it’s a little too hidden, eh?
When you do finally open a door, you’re presented with an airy interior that’s a great example of function meeting form. You can really sink into those big and comfy chairs up front, with all the controls in perfect reaching distance for the driver. The dashboard is a rare exception to the perceived rule that everything simply must live on a touchscreen these days – in particular I love the knobs for the HVAC controls, which are tactile and easy to use.
It’s a notably spacious cabin, too. The rear accommodation in particular is worth mentioning, with a broad bench that offers a copious amount of leg room. Going five-up in most cars – especially when you’ve ended up with a group of friends all upwards of 6ft tall – can be a squeeze, but I can’t think of anything with such a relatively small footprint that has impressed me as much as this.
Storage is worth mentioning as well: the boot is huge, being deep and wide with no odd lumps or protrusions to eat into luggage or load space. The rear seats fold fully flat, too, and that, combined with a softly sprung ride, makes it a great space from which to capture the car-to-car tracking photos you see in Autocar.
Staying in the rear cabin, Honda’s ‘Magic’ seats really are as their name suggests, folding upwards to allow you to load large objects such as antique chess tables or rare Bride bucket seats (yes, this really happened) into the rear footwell, in effect turning the space into a second boot. Handy.
How does the Honda drive? Well, it drives and there isn’t too much more to say on that front. Urban driving seems to be its strong suit, with the HR-V often kicking into its EV mode around town and giving rapid yet quiet acceleration as a result.
The light steering is great for whirling around street corners and dodging city potholes, and it has a decent amount of steering angle that makes parallel parking predictable and easy. The low-speed ride is decent enough but not outstanding: it soaks up lumps and bumps reasonably well but struggles with the larger ones that are all too common these days.
It’s a decent motorway cruiser, too. The ride is great at higher speeds, and the cabin is refined, with wind and road noise kept to a minimum in a way that rivals struggle to match – until you get to a hill. The HR-V has a fairly piddly power output of 129bhp, which is converted into forward motion by an e-CVT that soon makes unhappy noises once inclines begin to steepen.
I’d liken the sound to driving a range-extender, but frankly it’s much louder and much, much more annoying. With such a relatively low amount of horsepower, you end up stressing the engine substantially at speed, and as a result attempting to climb hills at motorway speeds will soon have your passengers worrying the car is about to blow up. At least the sound system is good enough that you can simply drown out the noise.
Head onto a twisty road, though, and you’ll be nothing if not disappointed. The steering, so light and pleasant in town, quickly becomes an irritant, providing absolutely zero feedback or feel. Not to say that it’s useless – the HR-V very much goes where you point it – but you’ll derive absolutely no pleasure from threading it down even the most brilliant road.
It’s not a car for enthusiasts, then, but it’s hard to imagine typical buyers having much to complain about – especially so given that not a single thing went wrong throughout our stewardship.
Honda HR-V 1.5 iMMD E:HEV Advance Style Plus
Prices: List price new £39,535 List price now £37,825 Price as tested £43,085
Options: Obscura Black Pack £1750, Urban Grey Pearl Paint £700, Illumination Pack £565, dog guard £360, floor mats £175
Economy and range: Claimed economy 52.3mpg Fuel tank 40 litres Test average 45.7mpg Test best 48.9mpg Test worst 42.8mpg Real-world range 402 miles
Tech Highlights: 0-62mph 10.7sec Top speed 106mph Engine 4 cyls in line, 1498cc, petrol, plus electric motor Max power 129bhp at 6000-6400rpm Max torque 187lb ft at 4500-5000rpm Gearbox e-CVT Boot 319 litres Wheels 7.5Jx18in, alloy Tyres 225/50 R18, Michelin e-Primacy Kerb weight 1401kg
Service and running costs: Contract hire rate £566 pcm CO₂ 122g/km Service costs None Other costs None Fuel costs £1556 Running costs including fuel £1556 Cost per mile 13 pence Faults None
