Honda Accord 2020 review

I'm Nathan Ponchard, this is Chasing Cars, and this is the 10th generation Honda Accord. Now you might be hard-pressed to remember what the last few Accords have looked like, aside from perhaps the last Accord Euro from 2008 to 2015, and that's because the American ones have all been boring as hell. But this Fastback version is determined to change all that. On sale in the US for almost two years, you might question why Honda Australia decided to bring the new Accord in, given that they only expect to sell 150 a year. That's just 12 and a half cars a month, in a rapidly shrinking, medium-sized sedan market. The answer is they reckon this car is good enough to be here. It is not only sexy, but it's seductive enough to win over both traditional Accord buyers who are very conservative, and Accord Euro buyers who like a sporty car, and that's what this car is about. When I first saw pictures of the new Accords inside, I instantly thought, Mazda6! And that'd be no surprise, because the Mazda's set the benchmark now for quite a few years, probably especially for an American car, and in fact, the Accord sedan and the Mazda6 sedan have exactly the same wheelbase, so it's probably no coincidence. But now that I'm sitting in here, there actually is quite a lot of Honda flavour in this car, although I don't think it quite matches the outside in terms of its design savvy. Now, this fairly minimal layout here is actually reasonably pleasant. It has this wood film on the dash here that looks like open-pore wood, but is actually just a veneer. The vent dials here are quite nice to operate, but they do look quite plastichrome-y. It does have a big screen up here, which finally has Apple CarPlay in a Honda, and works a lot better when you do have that happening, but it does look a little bit temporary. I don't know, you could probably tear this bloody thing off. And this is just a hangover from Honda in the 90s. I don't think anyone needs a cover for that, in fact, that could have been done a lot better. But we do have a USB slot in here, and wireless phone charging buried in there somewhere, as well as another USB down in the centre here. The design in front of me here too, I do like the general consistency of the fonts and all that sort of stuff, but I don't think that the instrument graphics and those other things quite match the highs of that beautiful clarity of Honda's in the late 80s and perhaps early 90s. As for the driving position, I'm sitting really dead square behind this really nice-to-hold steering wheel, and we've only got a couple of turns lock-to-lock here, so you do feel like you're quite in control. And one thing that I love about the front here is that there is a little bit of old Honda 80s flavour, and that the cowl of the car is quite low, and you can see the bonnet shape and the slight little humps over the headlights at the front here, and that just gives a little bit of extra dynamism to the Accord. In terms of the door trims and that sort of stuff, there's a reasonable amount of space to store things, but you couldn't fit a 1.25 or a 1.5 litre bottle. And while this driver's seat has 12-way electric adjustment, which is actually pretty good, with this really quite nice perforated leather centre, the passenger only gets four-way, which means fore-and-aft on the base and fore-and-aft on the backrest. And that's just like, I don't know, a 60s Holden Brougham, and that's not good enough, I don't think. In terms of the overall switchgear, we have these two little banks of switches on the steering wheel here that are a lot neater and better to use than the old Honda ones that ran down here, and particularly for the head-up display, the trip computer, and some of the safety stuff, we have a little strip along here where it's all gathered together at a nice, easy-to-use, and easy-to-understand fashion, rather than burying them away in other bits of the car, and that is sensible and smart. Now, the seating position in the new Accord have actually been adjusted too. The front seat's 25mm lower than before in terms of hip point, and the back seat is 20mm lower than before, yet you have this amazing theatre view from the back seat. In fact, I reckon that this is actually the Accord's piece de resistance, because you've got so much space. I'm sitting behind myself here, and there isn't a chance in the world that any of my limbs can touch that seat in front of me. And the view from here, even with the sunroof, with this little dent here with the roof lining to accommodate that, is terrific. Here you've got rear air vents, you've got two USB ports, you've got a folding centre armrest here with this little flip-up cup holder, although it's probably a bit lower than you might be ideal. You have a lockable ski port going through here, and you can fold down both backrests to extend that huge volume from the boot that we mentioned earlier. From the moment you look at the new Accord, you can tell that this is a more advanced car than the cars that have preceded it. In fact, it's the first Accord since the 90s to actually be more than just a plain old three-box boring sedan. Now, at the front here, we have Honda's first use of an active grille shutter on an Accord, we have a full flush underbody in this car, and Honda claims that it's 3% more aerodynamic, although they don't give you a number, so who knows 3% better than what? We have full LED headlights here, we also have these little vents in here where it sucks air in and spits it out down the side to again improve the aero, and even the A-pillars are 20% thinner than before, and they've moved back at the base towards the driver to give more of an upright stance and actually a better view from inside the car. It also has more of an angle to the whole glasshouse to make the car look a little bit more sporty, much like the fastback on the rear of the vehicle. Now, there's been quite a bit of work on the car also in terms of its strength. It's 24% stiffer in torsion and 32% stiffer in bending, but it's also 70 kilos lighter than before. In fact, the petrol is only 1,504 kilos, and this hybrid here is 1,591, and that's pretty good for a car that's as big as this. In terms of size, it is big. It's 4.9 metres long, but that's actually shorter than the last car, would you believe? Now, it's also wider, lower, wider tracks, and has a 55 millimetre longer wheelbase, so there's just a general stance about this car that the hopeless old Accord just did not have. As we come around to the back here, this avant-garde for an Accord look continues with the new car, and that's not only just the fastback shape but also having this six-light window treatment. We've got this extra little window here for better vision. We've got multi-link independent rear suspension here mounted on its own subframe, and best of all, in a sedan, we have this huge boot. Now, these taillights might have a bit of a Forester vibe about it, but that's all gone once you open it up in here because that is nearly 25% bigger than the old car's boot. It's 570 litres on both the hybrid and the petrol because the hybrid's battery is now much smaller and sits underneath the rear seat. In fact, this has so much room in here, you could do this. The difference between the Accord and Australia is that for some time, from 2003 until 2015, we had two Accords. We had the Accord Euro, which is essentially the European car designed for European tastes and more for drivers, and we had the regular Accord, which was essentially the American car, which was a softer, more of a luxe mobile, the one, only one available with a V6. And then the last generation, they merged into one, which had both a four-cylinder version and a V6 version, and the less we say about that Accord, the better, because it really was probably the worst model in the car's 43-year history. So this 10th-generation car is trying extremely hard to capture not only what the Accord used to be, but also the spirit of the Euro in the same vehicle. Now, part of that step change has been a change in drivetrain philosophy. The former 2.4 ATMO and the 3.5-litre V6 have been replaced by one petrol engine, which is a development of the 1.5 turbo out of the CR-V and the Civic. Now, in this case, it has a different turbocharger and it's had changes to the CVT automatic to give it more of a direct drive and reduce that rubber band effect. It also is combined with 20 metres extra torque and it has that 260 newton metres all the way from 1,600 to 5,000 RPM, and you can feel that when you're driving it. It's actually a really drivable, quite a sweet engine, more so than it is in the slightly raucous and rubber-bandy Civic. Now, the other engine is an Atkinson Cycle 2.0-litre petrol tied to a battery electric transmission with ECVT in Honda-speak, so it's the new hybrid. And it is much cheaper and a better car around than the old Accord hybrid. It is a different drivetrain to drive than the petrol in that it is probably a sweeter sounding thing in that it just picks one rev port and just sits there. And you have that silky low-speed torque in the engine because it has 315 newton metres from zero to 2,000 RPM, and that is tangible when you're driving it pretty much anywhere. It also has 158 kilowatts, which is more than the petrol, but it also weighs like 90 kilos more, so I kind of think that's mitigated a bit when you're actually going flat out, although it's probably a little bit quicker. Now, where the Accord really, really desperately needed to make up ground was its dynamics, and it has been transformed. Gone is that hideous steering that was so over-light and so disconnected, it felt like it was attached to some kind of parachute in the air somewhere and not in the car that you were driving. And the ride and the general handling of the car was so disinterested, and they've been replaced by a car that is really nicely poised, is really quite keen in corners. And for a car as big as this Accord, this is 4.9 metres long, it's as big as a Commodore, it feels really quite agile and shrinks around you. Its performance in corners is progressive and nicely balanced, although I don't think the tyres quite keep up with the handling. Its performance on bumpy roads, however, which we're on now on these added inch wheels, it's acceptable and it's improved from the past, but I don't think it's anywhere near the benchmark of what a medium-sized sedan is, and I don't know, it's probably the weakest part of the whole Accord dynamic package. It is quiet though, and that's nice, and I suppose if you're paying $48,000 to $50,000 for a car, you expect refinement, and as a whole, the Accord delivers. Starting at $47,990 for the petrol, or $50,490 for this hybrid version, the newer Accord comes in only one high-spec, called VTi LX, and it gets pretty much everything as standard. What it doesn't come with though, is the 2.0-litre turbo petrol and the 10-speed automatic or 6-speed manual options of the range-topping American car, and that's because they're all only available in left-hand drive. That said, we should be happy that the new Accord's here at all. In fact, you've got to wonder why some of these high-car operators would buy a Camry hybrid after trying this car, because the dynamism of its handling and the space of its back seat really are persuasive, and that should be celebrated. If you haven't subscribed, please do so below the video, hit the notification bell and leave a comment on the new Honda Accord or on Chasing Cars. Thanks for watching.