Inside the CR-V, the relation to the Civic is immediately obvious, as the dashboard looks much the same, including Honda’s basic but inoffensive touchscreen infotainment system.
This will be a positive for some people, because everything feels completely indestructible and is easy to use, but if you’re stepping out of a Kia Sorento or a Hyundai Santa Fe, it won’t feel special at all, with coarse and scratchy materials never far away.
The rear seats slide and recline and have very generous leg room. The boot is competitive for volume, but it’s deep rather than long and contains a step when the rear seats are folded down. For the time being, there’s also no seven-seat option, unlike with those Korean rivals.
Honda’s product presentation used terms like ‘exhilarating’ and ‘sports car’ when describing the driving experience of this large SUV. You will be shocked to hear that the CR-V is neither of those things, I’m sure. What it is instead is nicely set up for a smooth and unobtrusive drive.
Apart from some slight underlying firmness over broken paving, the CR-V rides smoothly on its standard adaptive dampers, stopping just short of floatiness. The moderately heavy steering is precise and even imparts a modicum of feedback. A bit more front-end grip would be welcome for ultimate confidence, but you have to be cornering at child-nauseating speeds to run into understeer. And the brakes are perfectly progressive – not a given with electrified cars.
The powertrain also impresses. With 181bhp pulling 1916kg, it’s not fast, but the performance is perfectly adequate. What’s more important is that it feels effortless, thanks to the motor taking the strain and engine only making itself heard in extremis. And a benefit of Honda’s unusual system, where most of the power comes from the motor, is that it isn’t much slower in EV mode.
It promises to be economical, too. We had a limited amount of time with the car so couldn’t run the battery dry for a proper range test, but with a full battery, it predicted 41 miles of electric-only range. When driven in Save mode, which is equivalent to running with an empty battery, it returned an indicated 49mpg and still felt powerful enough.