Good lord. I knew the rear end on the current-gen Honda Civic was “polarising” but I guess didn’t quite grasp how woefully inadequate that word was for describing your reactions following Friday’s Honda Civic Hatch review. Luckily for you, a reader read your rage and did something about it.
Sebastian Negrete, who says he’s a Chilean designer, has a master’s degree in Car and Transportation Design in Italy, and worked with Lamborghini in 2009, took it upon himself to modify the arse of the Civic.
“Thanks to the Covid quarantine, I had a bit of time at home to spend using my Photoshop skills,” he wrote in an email. “After reading the comments on your latest Honda Civic Hatch article, which were very critical of the rear end styling of the Civic, I decided to clean it and fix it a little bit using Honda’s own parts bin and trying to respect the hard points to give it a notch of reality.”
Here is Negrete’s rendering:
This is what he did:
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Changed the tail lights with modified Honda Insight units. (Used the “red” sections and avoided the upper clear corners.)
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Got rid of both rear wings, upper and lower windshield.
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Cleaned the trunk area using the Insight’s bumper treatment, which has a nice curved line that goes all the way up to the tail lights and deletes unnecessary lines.
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Got rid of all the much-hated fake intakes.
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Changed the central exhaust to a dual exit exhaust with two separate tips, one at each side.
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Created a body line that starts at the high end of the rear diffuser and matches the one on the lower sections of the doors.
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While at it, [he] did the only real body modification, which was fixing the rear door shut line so that it flows with the wheel well.
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The rear bumper line also flows to match the central line at the doors. The initial curve matches the one on the shoulder line.
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Modified slightly the black plastic piece that acts as a fake window at the C-pillar.
After the modifications, I have to admit the car looks much cleaner and more… relaxed? Is that the right word? It now exhibits restraint, where the original car does not. In fact, it sort of looks like a Maserati Ghibli now. Not the most beautiful car in the word, but certainly far from the ugliest.
“It’s not the best render, but I did this only using the touch pad,” Negrete admitted. “Overall, I think it looks more sophisticated and a lot more like the older brother of a ‘90s Civic EG.”
What do you think? This or the thing that looks like it was made from paper folded a thousand times?