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Honda Civic Tourer set for Frankfurt

Australia has shown little interest as the Civic Tourer aims its credentials at Europe.

Family size and frugal manners boost Honda's chances of success with its new Civic Tourer wagon. But Australia has shown little interest as the Tourer - a five-seater wagon based on the Civic hatch - aims its credentials at Europe.

The UK-built wagon goes public next month at the Frankfurt motor show and on sale in Europe from early next year. Almost fully reflecting the Tourer concept shown at this year's Detroit motor show in January, the wagon gets Honda's 1.6-litre turbo-diesel engine as fitted to the Australian Civic hatch, or a 1.8-litre petrol engine.

It has the same 2595mm wheelbase as the Civic hatch but adds 235mm of rear overhang for extra cargo space - and gets a lower cargo floor than the hatch - down by 137mm - to ease loading and unloading exercises. Honda says the Tourer gets the company's "Magic Seats" design - also used on the Jazz - to claim boot space of 624 litres with the rear seats up, or 1668 litres with the seats folded.

The Tourer also gets ZF Sachs' new electronically adjustable rear dampers that can be switched through three modes: Comfort, Normal and Dynamic. Honda Australia has dismissed the Civic wagon, saying the Australian small car wagon market is small. Six carmakers sell small-car wagons on the Australian market - Hyundai, Holden, Peugeot, Renault, Toyota and Volkswagen.
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This reporter is on Twitter: @cg_dowling
 

Neil Dowling
Contributing Journalist
GoAutoMedia Cars have been the corner stone to Neil’s passion, beginning at pre-school age, through school but then pushed sideways while he studied accounting. It was rekindled when he started contributing to magazines including Bushdriver and then when he started a motoring section in Perth’s The Western Mail. He was then appointed as a finance writer for the evening Daily News, supplemented by writing its motoring column. He moved to The Sunday Times as finance editor and after a nine-year term, finally drove back into motoring when in 1998 he was asked to rebrand and restyle the newspaper’s motoring section, expanding it over 12 years from a two-page section to a 36-page lift-out. In 2010 he was selected to join News Ltd’s national motoring group Carsguide and covered national and international events, launches, news conferences and Car of the Year awards until November 2014 when he moved into freelancing, working for GoAuto, The West Australian, Western 4WDriver magazine, Bauer Media and as an online content writer for one of Australia’s biggest car groups. He has involved himself in all aspects including motorsport where he has competed in everything from motocross to motorkhanas and rallies including Targa West and the ARC Forest Rally. He loves all facets of the car industry, from design, manufacture, testing, marketing and even business structures and believes cars are one of the few high-volume consumables to combine a very high degree of engineering enlivened with an even higher degree of emotion from its consumers.
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