Honda City Diesel: Long Term Review

By the time you read this, the Honda City diesel would have completed over two months in our long term fleet. Although the City spends most of its mornings stuck in one of Mumbai’s never-ending traffic  jams and pottering about at an average speed of less than five kilometers an hour, never once has it thrown a hissy fit and been uncomfortable. In fact, the City usually ends up wrapping one in a cocoon of steel, leather and glass with its beautiful infotainment system pampering you in the music of your choice.

Has the City been perfect? Well, no. There has been a strange issue with the Bluetooth telephone sync in our car, something we think could possibly be sorted by resetting the infotainment system by taking off the battery terminals for a few minutes. Our car has also had issues with water leaking into the front passenger side footwell during heavy rainfall. Although Honda claim that water seeped in through the fresh air induction vent, readers of ZigWheels have also written in saying otherwise. A few mentioned how their cars too had a similar issue of water leaking in through the left front door due to a faulty plastic bonding agent that helps hold the door panel in place. Strangely though, the leakage issue only seems to affect cars from the earlier production lots and not those made recently.

Although Honda seems to have sorted our readers’ cars and our cars out at the earliest, a leaky car is not what people expect in the year 2014 especially if they are paying upwards of Rs 11 lakh. That said, the Honda has been returning a steady 17kmpl instart stop city traffic and upwards of 20kmpl on the highways and has been keeping our colleagues extremely comfortable thanks to the armchair-esque front seats in the City.

Logbook:

Total Kms: 5500km

Efficiency: 18kmpl

Date acquired: June 2014

Costs: Nil

Cheers: Comfort, fuel efficiency, urban performance

Sneers: Water leakage, bluetooth sync issues