Having been driving my 1.3SE for around a month now, I have to say I think Honda have done a pretty good job. All the important things like performance, comfort, versatility, economy, etc are what I expected and what I wanted. But some of the electronic driver aids are a bit odd in their operation; I can't quite decide whether any of the following are faults or just foibles I'm going to have to get used to.
Lights
• I won’t repeat what others have said about the auto lights, apart from noting that they do seem over-sensitive compared with my previous car with this feature (Renault Scenic).
• Sometimes when I unlock the car with the remote the headlights come on … and sometimes they don’t. May be associated with whether – when the car was locked previously – the lights were left to auto-off after delay or were switched off manually. Or maybe it’s the dreaded auto-lights again.
High Beam Assist:
• Sometimes this switches off when I flash the lights by lifting the stalk … and sometimes it doesn’t.
• Sometimes I find I’ve managed to switch it off accidentally without knowing why, I’m pretty certain I haven’t manually switched to high beam or flashed the lights.
Idle-Stop:
• Mostly does what I expect, but when it doesn’t it’s almost impossible to know why. Just experienced it not working with the multi-display saying it’s because of the A/C … but the A/C wasn’t switched on. You seem to get this warning when the ventilation is set to “screen” (fully clockwise), which is pretty confusing.
Traffic Sign Recognition
• Generally works OK (although can get confused by signs on joining roads), but recently I managed to complete a 15 mile commute without it “seeing” a single sign. Must have accidentally switched it off somehow, but the manual doesn’t suggest how that might have happened. I won’t be trying the intelligent speed limiter if the sign recognition isn’t reliable.
Infotainment
• Having to acknowledge the “take care when driving” warning on the start-up splash screen every time is annoying.
• Touch screen can seem a bit insensitive (or maybe I just keep missing the right part of the screen), and you can't operate everything from the steering wheel buttons. Sometimes several taps are necessary before it reacts which is not good because it takes your attention off the road. It would be handy if one of the steering wheel buttons acted like a mouse click to activate whatever option was highlighted on screen, but if this exists I haven’t found it yet.
• Got a strange error on start-up one day, something about “Service not started”. It went away eventually after much cancelling, ignoring, and re-starting the radio. Still don’t know what that was.
• Having eventually found the settings to enable RDS traffic info when listening to DAB, the radio now interrupts for traffic warnings and you get an on-screen option to cancel which is all good. But it doesn’t announce the station broadcasting the traffic like my old Scenic’s FM radio did, so you don’t know whether it’s relevant or not. Also, if you do interrupt the traffic broadcast because you want to get back to what you were listening to, the radio can “hang” and all you get is silence.
• Screen brightness can vary suddenly, you’re driving along normally and suddenly the screen flashes up to full brightness unexpectedly and can then dim immediately again. I know it’s sensitive to external light levels but I’d expect a more gradual change. May be associated with the hyper-active auto lights if they’ve suddenly switched off.
• Disappointing selection of apps in the Honda app centre.