There are some rumors that are so good, the wish to believe in them overshadows any second thoughts or possible asterisks. This is that kind of rumor. Best Car, a Japanese publication, believes the next Honda Civic Type R hot hatchback will us an electric all-wheel drive system that resembles the one Acura uses in several of its products, including the NSX supercar. That system would enable the Type R to nudge up against 400 total system horsepower and provide all-wheel drive with side-to-side torque vectoring across the rear axle.
The shift from front-wheel drive to torque-vectoring "Super Handling All-Wheel Drive" would make the Civic Type R (CTR) a whole different animal. But remember, this is already a phenomenal car, even with its front paws doing the dragging, so to speak. Honda updated it for 2020, significantly honing its edge, but even the pre-update car left a big impression on us. We called it "simply the best performing front-drive production car in history"—and that's how you should think of it. With 306 horsepower today, the CTR suffers almost no discernible torque steer, a feat for any powerful, front-drive car.
If there's a downside to this rumor, it's that adding all-wheel drive could nudge the Civic Type R into a different station in the automotive world. It's doubtful that we could call an all-wheel drive CTR "simply the best performing all-wheel drive production car in history"—it might not be. Honda would surely lose the superlative quality of the current model's achievements. And that's not even delving into the veracity of the rumor itself. Would Acura agree to lend its signature SH-AWD handling technology to the Honda Civic? How much would the company have to change the Civic platform to accommodate it? Could Honda sell any Civic at the likely $40,000-plus price point it might entail?
We're not sure about any of that, nor are those our calls to make. But let's get back into Best Car's wishful thinking, er, information. For one, the 2.0-liter turbocharged inline-four would be retained and mainly unchanged, but the addition of the the twin electric motors at the rear could increase the powertrain's total output significantly.
Let's take the Acura MDX Sport Hybrid SH-AWD. It has three electric motors, one housed in the transmission and two at the rear axle. The transmission-mounted motor makes 47 horsepower, and the two rear motors make 36 horsepower apiece. If we assume that the Civic would skip the transmission-mounted motor and only adopt the so-called "twin-motor units" at the rear axle, and they were the same as the MDX's, you'd be looking at the addition of 72 system horsepower. Add that to the 306 hp that the Type R makes, and you're already at 378 total system horsepower. It's not hard to imagine a few tweaks leading to a 395-400-horsepower figure.
Realistic or not, an all-wheel drive Civic Type R would literally be in a different class. If Honda moves the Type R's performance up that many notches, we'd hope that the mellow but lovable Civic Si would get some attention to give it some of the edge the front-drive Type R would be leaving behind, and scootch it closer to the for-now more powerful and slightly more expensive Volkswagen GTI.
July 15, 2020 at 06:21AM
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Rumor: The Honda Civic Type R May Go Hybrid, Get AWD and 400 HP - Motor Trend
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