Further to my test drive and placing an order as described here
https://clubjazz.org/forum/index.php?topic=12141.0 I've finally got hold of the keys to my two-tone red Crosstar.
The road on the way home from the dealer felt smoother than when I went in my HR-V. While many potential owners of the Crosstar will be attracted by the extra ride height compared to the normal Mk 4 Jazz, I think the extra travel on the suspension is also worth having (although I haven't ridden in a normal Mk 4 to do a direct comparison).
This afternoon the Crosstar has been on a 40 mile trip on rural roads (B roads or lower category). The fibometer (ie the trip meter) claimed 76 mpg. The maximum speed on that trip was about 55mph with most of it much slower as a good proportion of the journey involved ups, downs and bends which combined to provide a good test of the hybrid system. I put my OBDII reader into the OBDII socket and set it up to send data to the Torque app running on my phone (parked in the cup-holder near the mirror) so I could see the engine rpm. The engine spent the majority of its operating time running at around 2000 rpm but occasionally went as low as 1600 rpm while it got up to about 3500 rpm climbing a 1 in 6 (15%) hill. 3000 rpm seems to be the threshold above which the engine noise becomes audible - much the same as the previous generation of Jazz. This initial observation suggests that Honda decided that around 2000 rpm was the sweet spot for engine efficiency and below 1500 rpm is best avoided.
When I left the dealer the battery was at about 80% (I'm wondering how they got the charge that high) and the vehicle ran on battery for the first half mile until the charge was down to 20% (2 bars on the gauge). Thereafter the battery charge ranged between 20% and 40% under normal driving conditions - Honda seems to have configured the system to leave plenty of capacity to store energy recovered from going down hills. The only time I saw the charge at 100% was after going down a substantial hill and that charge was used to power the next half mile on level ground. I didn't notice the direct engine drive being used at any point on that trip.
I did notice some glare in the windscreen from sun on the top of the dashboard but this was almost uniform and easy to see through. I deliberately didn't wear my polaroids so I could check this aspect although I had already checked this on my test drive but wanted to be sure that I wasn't going to encounter problems if I forgot to put on the polaroids before starting a journey (they are clip-ons so can't be put on without stopping).
The one annoyance with the vehicle so far is the over-zealous Road Departure Mitigation System which does a lot of bonging each time the system thinks it necessary to alert the driver. There are two pages in the paper version of the handbook listing the conditions and limitations of the system (see pages 474 - 477 in the online PDF version of the manual) and driving on smaller roads encounters a lot of those limitations. The system is automatically enabled each time the vehicle is started but there is a procedure involving fiddling with controls on the steering wheel to temporarily disable it. I need to practice doing that. In the mean time I've turned the sound level of the alarms to the minimum setting. Apart from this annoyance the vehicle provides a very pleasant driving experience. Nicer than my HR-V and much nicer than the Mk 3 Jazz and I think any Mk 3 Jazz owner will be surprised by the transformation.
The rear seat room is very generous (as on the Mk 3 Jazz) while the boot isn't so generous (but the cubby hole under the floor is useful for the bits and pieces which otherwise tend to roll around). With rear seats folded the distance from boot sill to back of front seats is about 1.5m.