From LOG CABIN DEMOCRAT
It's almost that time of year when the tax man giveth back a portion of what he hath taken away.
For many, this means it's new car season. But which new car is the best choice? Log Cabin Staff Writer Joe Lamb decided to find out by testing four of 2007's hottest offerings under $25,000, the Nissan Altima Coupe, Scion tC, Chevrolet Cobalt SS Supercharged and Honda Civic Si sedan. This review is the first of two installments.
This writer's opinions on the merits of each car are just that, his own opinions. They do not reflect those of the Log Cabin Democrat in any way.
Honda Civic Si
Civic Si feels separate and different from the base model as soon as you open the door. Purists might bemoan the retreat of the hatchback Civic Si from American shores, but the new four-door Si's supportive and low-slung sports seats, stumpy alloy shifter and pedals positioned perfectly for heel-and-toe downshifts do their part to confirm that the spirit of the old Si remains intact, regardless of the door count.
A big part of that spirit, as with every fast Honda since the 1988 Prelude 2.0 Si, is tucked under the hood. Here the new Si doesn't disappoint. Within a whisker of 100 horsepower per liter, the Si's high-compression 2.0 liter twincam four pumps out 197 horsepower at a giddy 7,800 rpm. Also true to Honda form it makes a rather less exclamation point-worthy 139 lb-ft of torque.
The car tested wore more black than Johnny Cash. The seats are black, the carpet is black, the door panels are black, etc. Only the sporty red stitching on the seats and well-judged use of alloy-effect plastic on the console and steering wheel saved the car's interior from looking like the lost-and-found bin at a Cannibal Corpse concert.
Honda wisely chose to fit the Si with electrically-assisted power steering as opposed to hydraulic steering found in the rest of the Civic lineup. The result is a sharper feel at the helm, seeming at once more delicate and more mechanical. Feedback from the road is good, but not outstanding. Sadly, Honda's days of unassisted, feel-every-pebble steering seem to have died with the NSX, but the Si's steering is still about as good as it gets in this price range.
The Si is fitted with a limited slip differential, but you wouldn't know it at parking lot speeds, where there's wheelspin aplenty. At higher speeds the 'diff makes its presence known, divvying up traction between the front wheels to punt the car out of corners with a minimum of wheelspin, but it doesn't emulate the more uncompromising Honda Integra Type-R's (available only to the European and Asian market) wonder differental, which is reputed to give an almost rear-drive feel.
The Si gets a red-tinted tachometer as opposed to the standard Civic's more peaceful blue one, and the separate digital speedometer stacked on top of the 'tach in a housing just under the windscreen is shared by both. Shuffling your gaze up and down between the tach and speedo, rather than side to side to make sure neither socially sensible revs nor Conway traffic laws are breached takes some getting used to; and mighty tempting it is to venture into the naughty side of both.
A twist of the key is all it takes to know Honda put some of their best and brightest to task on the Si engine. A trait of most high-compression engines (11.0 to 1 for the Si, the same as a Lamborghini Murcielago LP640(!)), the cylinders make high-pitched chirping sounds as the starter motor stirs the engine before it bursts into life with a surprisingly bass-rich burble. The as-standard sports exhaust system makes about as good a noise as you're going to get with an inline four, at once cultured and exuberant.
Low revs aren't the Si's fort. Compared to, say, the Scion tC or Cobalt SS SC, the engine feels downright anemic below 2,000 rpm. But Honda's engineers have been working for almost two decades to perfect a hole card that trumps the tC's Camry-sourced 2.3 liter and Nissan's 2.5 liter, and almost matches the Cobalt SS SC's supercharged 2.2 in outright power output: i-VTEC. Explaining just how VTEC works is one of those long-winded gearhead diatribes that sends even the most patient listeners running for the hills. Suffice to say it's a mechanism by which the camshafts shift slightly at a certain RPM (6,000 in the Si's case, give or take a few hundred revs) to allow the engine to breathe in as much fuel and air as is physically possible.
It's the same basic principal as the old "cammer" engines of muscle car lore. Dragstrip aficionados will know the rough, uneven idle of Detroit big iron tuned to sing like Pavarotti down the strip, but so highly-strung they're barely able to keep ticking over at anything under 1,000 rpm.
i-VTEC is the best of both worlds. With the camshafts spun back to their normal low-rev, around-town configuration the Si is a grocery getter, getting 31 miles to the gallon. Above 6,000 rpm it's a racer, and fuel consumption concerns fly right out the window. If the engine pulls a Jekyll and Hyde from idle to 6,000 rpm, it's a full-on Dracula from 6,000 to the 8,000 rpm redline.
There's a noticeable kick in the back as the needle passes six grand, almost like the second stage of an old four-barrel carburetor coming on-line, accompanied by a sudden hardening of the exhaust note and induction whine. Keep the revs below the VTEC camshaft shift point and it's an economy car. Pass it and it's full speed ahead and damn the ice caps. Making an engine spin faster, to refute the oft-repeated racetrack mantra, is one of several replacements for displacement.
You can ask for an automatic transmission in an Si, but you're not going to get one. You'll shift your own gears, says Honda, and you'll like it, or at least you'd better. The only place you'll find a finer shift this side of a Ferrari is in Honda's S2000 or NSX.
While the engine, steering and transmission approach motoring perfection, there's mixed messages from the chassis.
Honda's found a great balance with the Si's suspension. It's not the chiropractor's delight that is the Subaru STi or Mitsubishi EVO IX (both also performance sedans) but nor is it the wet noodle of a host of pretenders to the hot import throne.
Though the suspension is right in the not-too-hard, not-too-soft "Goldilocks zone," the chassis isn't infused with the same sportscar DNA as the engine, gearshift and steering. It might be a different story with the shorter-wheelbase coupe, but it was a real disappointment as the sedan's on-its-toes cornering stance dissolved in the corners into boring old understeer no matter what fancy trail braking or mid-corner lifts of the throttle you threw at it. Though Honda did elect to position handbrake lever provocatively close to the shifter, tail-out antics were clearly not on Honda's handling wish list this time.
Learn to revel in everything the Si does well and the joy per mile figure is still at the top of its class. To get the best out of the Honda you don't play it fast and loose like you would the Cobalt SS S/C. Instead, it's best enjoyed as a precision instrument, and a big part of the joy in driving it is using the excellent steering and scalpel-sharp throttle response to push the front tires to their limits of adhesion without stepping over.
In short: An astounding amount of engineering for the money.
Scion tC
Good marketing has always sold cars, but Scion's parent company, Toyota, has taken vehicle marketing to the next level; a level that means no review of a Scion product can be complete without a review of the marketing behind it.
The Japanese "big three" of Nissan, Toyota and Honda realized in the '80s that while the American market had finally come to respect the depth of Japanese engineering, a lot of us yanks had a hankering for something with a little more panache than, say, a 1989 Maxima, Camry or Accord.
The solution? Add to the basic architecture of these cars a luxurious but thoroughly modern interior, pack the doors and engine compartment with enough sound-deadening material to stop small-arms rounds, tidy up the bodywork a bit, send the engineers back to the drawing board until they come up with engines that make the smoothest-running American small engines seem, in comparison, like overloaded rock tumblers and, most importantly, change the badges and up the price.
Their plan worked. The 1986 Acura Legend (Honda), 1989 Lexus LS 400 (Toyota) and 1990 Infinity Q45 (Nissan) sold like hotcakes, leading the three offshoot branches to grow, gradually, into the well-established mighty oaks we know them as today.
More than 15 years later, Toyota's taken the next logical step. They've got the sensible, solid crowd pleased with their Toyota-badged offerings, and the folks who want unblemished leather, a silken drivetrain and a badge that might get mention in a hip-hop song are tickled pink with Lexus, but turn-of-the-century soundings by Toyota's marketing machine (which has historically been right up there with their engines for reliability) correctly detected another market on American soil; one more Amy Winehouse than Debbie Reynolds and more techno than philharmonic and that's where Scion comes in.
Founded in 2003 with the intent of capturing the brand loyalty of a generation jaded by drastic industry-wide quality increases and suddenly affordable luxury, Scion is well on its way to becoming as established a fixture in the American automotive scene as Lexus, Infinity or Acura. The marketing is spot-on for the fast-and-furious, never-a-dull-night, pseudo-streetwise, post-postmodern, neo-hipster (and hyphen-heavy) market.
But does the Scion flagship, the tC coupe, have the same youthful and exciting DNA pressed and forged into its metal as it does ingrained in its advertising? And equally important, is it as good as the almost too aggressively styled and dynamically competent Toyota Celica it effectively replaced?
The first thing that needs to be said about the tC doesn't seem to jive: It's got a Camry's engine. However, the Camry's engine, in truth, isn't half bad in the Camry. With the 300lb lighter tC bolted to it, it's actually quite good.
With the Civic Si's over achieving 2.0 liter four batting out a whisker under 200 horsepower and the Cobalt SS S/C's a whisker over 200, it would be easy to assume the 160-horse tC would feel underpowered in their company. The Cobalt's got it soundly outgunned but the tC's less-than-racy powerplant doesn't yield much ground to the Honda in off-the-line acceleration. The tC's 2.4-liter engine benefits from almost 25-percent greater displacement than the Si's, and this pays dividends for the Scion in the form of torque; 163 pound-feet, to be exact. That's 24 pound-feet greater than the Si's engine can thrash out.
The relationship between horsepower and its dastardly cousin torque is a complicated one. Suffice to say that torque is what shoves a car away from a stoplight and horsepower is what pulls it to high speeds. Once the Si's engine is on-song at 6,500 rpm it's the more powerful engine, but it'd take a well-driven Si to dust the torquier tC at the lights, horsepower advantage or no horsepower advantage.
It's a good-looking car too, though some say it looks like a motorized capybara. Little details like the chrome rings around the blacked-out tail lights and the twin sunroofs add up to lend the tC some much-needed charm, as the clean, chunky design follows the minimalist route in contrast to the old Celica's in-your-face styling.
Show the tC a corner and, like the Celica of old, it digs right in. It understeers a little too much at the limit for the most performance-oriented tastes, but what doesn't these days? At low speeds turn-in and grip seem especially tenacious, though. You could autocross this car.
In outright cornering grip the tC impresses, more so even than the Si, which was let down by its all-season tires (performance-oriented summer tires are offered on the Si as an optional extra). The ride quality is good overall. It's not sitting on particularly stiff springs and there's a lot of dive under braking, but the car's aggressive shock absorbers and anti-roll bar do a decent job keeping body roll in check.
Maybe the most appealing thing about the tC is the Scion performance catalog. Adding a Toyota Racing Development centrifugal supercharger, intake and exhaust kits, performance springs and a strut-brace bar, all available at your local Scion dealer, doesn't bring the cost out-of-line with the Cobalt SS S/C and Civic Si, and a souped-up Scion's performance would likely be as good or better.
You'd have to look to the aftermarket performance parts industry for a limited-slip differential for your ber tC, and from what we gathered driving the supercharged Cobalt, you'd need one.
In short: In many ways a worthy successor to the Celica; a solid chassis with unprecedented dealer-installed and warranty-friendly tuning potential.
It's almost that time of year when the tax man giveth back a portion of what he hath taken away.
For many, this means it's new car season. But which new car is the best choice? Log Cabin Staff Writer Joe Lamb decided to find out by testing four of 2007's hottest offerings under $25,000, the Nissan Altima Coupe, Scion tC, Chevrolet Cobalt SS Supercharged and Honda Civic Si sedan. This review is the first of two installments.
This writer's opinions on the merits of each car are just that, his own opinions. They do not reflect those of the Log Cabin Democrat in any way.
Honda Civic Si
Civic Si feels separate and different from the base model as soon as you open the door. Purists might bemoan the retreat of the hatchback Civic Si from American shores, but the new four-door Si's supportive and low-slung sports seats, stumpy alloy shifter and pedals positioned perfectly for heel-and-toe downshifts do their part to confirm that the spirit of the old Si remains intact, regardless of the door count.
A big part of that spirit, as with every fast Honda since the 1988 Prelude 2.0 Si, is tucked under the hood. Here the new Si doesn't disappoint. Within a whisker of 100 horsepower per liter, the Si's high-compression 2.0 liter twincam four pumps out 197 horsepower at a giddy 7,800 rpm. Also true to Honda form it makes a rather less exclamation point-worthy 139 lb-ft of torque.
The car tested wore more black than Johnny Cash. The seats are black, the carpet is black, the door panels are black, etc. Only the sporty red stitching on the seats and well-judged use of alloy-effect plastic on the console and steering wheel saved the car's interior from looking like the lost-and-found bin at a Cannibal Corpse concert.
Honda wisely chose to fit the Si with electrically-assisted power steering as opposed to hydraulic steering found in the rest of the Civic lineup. The result is a sharper feel at the helm, seeming at once more delicate and more mechanical. Feedback from the road is good, but not outstanding. Sadly, Honda's days of unassisted, feel-every-pebble steering seem to have died with the NSX, but the Si's steering is still about as good as it gets in this price range.
The Si is fitted with a limited slip differential, but you wouldn't know it at parking lot speeds, where there's wheelspin aplenty. At higher speeds the 'diff makes its presence known, divvying up traction between the front wheels to punt the car out of corners with a minimum of wheelspin, but it doesn't emulate the more uncompromising Honda Integra Type-R's (available only to the European and Asian market) wonder differental, which is reputed to give an almost rear-drive feel.
The Si gets a red-tinted tachometer as opposed to the standard Civic's more peaceful blue one, and the separate digital speedometer stacked on top of the 'tach in a housing just under the windscreen is shared by both. Shuffling your gaze up and down between the tach and speedo, rather than side to side to make sure neither socially sensible revs nor Conway traffic laws are breached takes some getting used to; and mighty tempting it is to venture into the naughty side of both.
A twist of the key is all it takes to know Honda put some of their best and brightest to task on the Si engine. A trait of most high-compression engines (11.0 to 1 for the Si, the same as a Lamborghini Murcielago LP640(!)), the cylinders make high-pitched chirping sounds as the starter motor stirs the engine before it bursts into life with a surprisingly bass-rich burble. The as-standard sports exhaust system makes about as good a noise as you're going to get with an inline four, at once cultured and exuberant.
Low revs aren't the Si's fort. Compared to, say, the Scion tC or Cobalt SS SC, the engine feels downright anemic below 2,000 rpm. But Honda's engineers have been working for almost two decades to perfect a hole card that trumps the tC's Camry-sourced 2.3 liter and Nissan's 2.5 liter, and almost matches the Cobalt SS SC's supercharged 2.2 in outright power output: i-VTEC. Explaining just how VTEC works is one of those long-winded gearhead diatribes that sends even the most patient listeners running for the hills. Suffice to say it's a mechanism by which the camshafts shift slightly at a certain RPM (6,000 in the Si's case, give or take a few hundred revs) to allow the engine to breathe in as much fuel and air as is physically possible.
It's the same basic principal as the old "cammer" engines of muscle car lore. Dragstrip aficionados will know the rough, uneven idle of Detroit big iron tuned to sing like Pavarotti down the strip, but so highly-strung they're barely able to keep ticking over at anything under 1,000 rpm.
i-VTEC is the best of both worlds. With the camshafts spun back to their normal low-rev, around-town configuration the Si is a grocery getter, getting 31 miles to the gallon. Above 6,000 rpm it's a racer, and fuel consumption concerns fly right out the window. If the engine pulls a Jekyll and Hyde from idle to 6,000 rpm, it's a full-on Dracula from 6,000 to the 8,000 rpm redline.
There's a noticeable kick in the back as the needle passes six grand, almost like the second stage of an old four-barrel carburetor coming on-line, accompanied by a sudden hardening of the exhaust note and induction whine. Keep the revs below the VTEC camshaft shift point and it's an economy car. Pass it and it's full speed ahead and damn the ice caps. Making an engine spin faster, to refute the oft-repeated racetrack mantra, is one of several replacements for displacement.
You can ask for an automatic transmission in an Si, but you're not going to get one. You'll shift your own gears, says Honda, and you'll like it, or at least you'd better. The only place you'll find a finer shift this side of a Ferrari is in Honda's S2000 or NSX.
While the engine, steering and transmission approach motoring perfection, there's mixed messages from the chassis.
Honda's found a great balance with the Si's suspension. It's not the chiropractor's delight that is the Subaru STi or Mitsubishi EVO IX (both also performance sedans) but nor is it the wet noodle of a host of pretenders to the hot import throne.
Though the suspension is right in the not-too-hard, not-too-soft "Goldilocks zone," the chassis isn't infused with the same sportscar DNA as the engine, gearshift and steering. It might be a different story with the shorter-wheelbase coupe, but it was a real disappointment as the sedan's on-its-toes cornering stance dissolved in the corners into boring old understeer no matter what fancy trail braking or mid-corner lifts of the throttle you threw at it. Though Honda did elect to position handbrake lever provocatively close to the shifter, tail-out antics were clearly not on Honda's handling wish list this time.
Learn to revel in everything the Si does well and the joy per mile figure is still at the top of its class. To get the best out of the Honda you don't play it fast and loose like you would the Cobalt SS S/C. Instead, it's best enjoyed as a precision instrument, and a big part of the joy in driving it is using the excellent steering and scalpel-sharp throttle response to push the front tires to their limits of adhesion without stepping over.
In short: An astounding amount of engineering for the money.
Scion tC
Good marketing has always sold cars, but Scion's parent company, Toyota, has taken vehicle marketing to the next level; a level that means no review of a Scion product can be complete without a review of the marketing behind it.
The Japanese "big three" of Nissan, Toyota and Honda realized in the '80s that while the American market had finally come to respect the depth of Japanese engineering, a lot of us yanks had a hankering for something with a little more panache than, say, a 1989 Maxima, Camry or Accord.
The solution? Add to the basic architecture of these cars a luxurious but thoroughly modern interior, pack the doors and engine compartment with enough sound-deadening material to stop small-arms rounds, tidy up the bodywork a bit, send the engineers back to the drawing board until they come up with engines that make the smoothest-running American small engines seem, in comparison, like overloaded rock tumblers and, most importantly, change the badges and up the price.
Their plan worked. The 1986 Acura Legend (Honda), 1989 Lexus LS 400 (Toyota) and 1990 Infinity Q45 (Nissan) sold like hotcakes, leading the three offshoot branches to grow, gradually, into the well-established mighty oaks we know them as today.
More than 15 years later, Toyota's taken the next logical step. They've got the sensible, solid crowd pleased with their Toyota-badged offerings, and the folks who want unblemished leather, a silken drivetrain and a badge that might get mention in a hip-hop song are tickled pink with Lexus, but turn-of-the-century soundings by Toyota's marketing machine (which has historically been right up there with their engines for reliability) correctly detected another market on American soil; one more Amy Winehouse than Debbie Reynolds and more techno than philharmonic and that's where Scion comes in.
Founded in 2003 with the intent of capturing the brand loyalty of a generation jaded by drastic industry-wide quality increases and suddenly affordable luxury, Scion is well on its way to becoming as established a fixture in the American automotive scene as Lexus, Infinity or Acura. The marketing is spot-on for the fast-and-furious, never-a-dull-night, pseudo-streetwise, post-postmodern, neo-hipster (and hyphen-heavy) market.
But does the Scion flagship, the tC coupe, have the same youthful and exciting DNA pressed and forged into its metal as it does ingrained in its advertising? And equally important, is it as good as the almost too aggressively styled and dynamically competent Toyota Celica it effectively replaced?
The first thing that needs to be said about the tC doesn't seem to jive: It's got a Camry's engine. However, the Camry's engine, in truth, isn't half bad in the Camry. With the 300lb lighter tC bolted to it, it's actually quite good.
With the Civic Si's over achieving 2.0 liter four batting out a whisker under 200 horsepower and the Cobalt SS S/C's a whisker over 200, it would be easy to assume the 160-horse tC would feel underpowered in their company. The Cobalt's got it soundly outgunned but the tC's less-than-racy powerplant doesn't yield much ground to the Honda in off-the-line acceleration. The tC's 2.4-liter engine benefits from almost 25-percent greater displacement than the Si's, and this pays dividends for the Scion in the form of torque; 163 pound-feet, to be exact. That's 24 pound-feet greater than the Si's engine can thrash out.
The relationship between horsepower and its dastardly cousin torque is a complicated one. Suffice to say that torque is what shoves a car away from a stoplight and horsepower is what pulls it to high speeds. Once the Si's engine is on-song at 6,500 rpm it's the more powerful engine, but it'd take a well-driven Si to dust the torquier tC at the lights, horsepower advantage or no horsepower advantage.
It's a good-looking car too, though some say it looks like a motorized capybara. Little details like the chrome rings around the blacked-out tail lights and the twin sunroofs add up to lend the tC some much-needed charm, as the clean, chunky design follows the minimalist route in contrast to the old Celica's in-your-face styling.
Show the tC a corner and, like the Celica of old, it digs right in. It understeers a little too much at the limit for the most performance-oriented tastes, but what doesn't these days? At low speeds turn-in and grip seem especially tenacious, though. You could autocross this car.
In outright cornering grip the tC impresses, more so even than the Si, which was let down by its all-season tires (performance-oriented summer tires are offered on the Si as an optional extra). The ride quality is good overall. It's not sitting on particularly stiff springs and there's a lot of dive under braking, but the car's aggressive shock absorbers and anti-roll bar do a decent job keeping body roll in check.
Maybe the most appealing thing about the tC is the Scion performance catalog. Adding a Toyota Racing Development centrifugal supercharger, intake and exhaust kits, performance springs and a strut-brace bar, all available at your local Scion dealer, doesn't bring the cost out-of-line with the Cobalt SS S/C and Civic Si, and a souped-up Scion's performance would likely be as good or better.
You'd have to look to the aftermarket performance parts industry for a limited-slip differential for your ber tC, and from what we gathered driving the supercharged Cobalt, you'd need one.
In short: In many ways a worthy successor to the Celica; a solid chassis with unprecedented dealer-installed and warranty-friendly tuning potential.
