I’m never quite sure how seriously one should take customer satisfaction surveys — too often you’ll find three different surveys giving three different results, often with so many category winners that just about everybody wins a prize.
I started with my own very amateur survey a few years ago — asking ordinary people what cars they drive and how happy they are with them, then asking friends who work on cars for a living which ones give their owners and mechanics the least headaches.
I don’t write their answers down anywhere, but I gather impressions, and a brand that always seems to come out smelling of roses is Honda (the same carmaker that shapes so well every year in the two biggest formal surveys, Synovate and JD Powers). Although I’ve driven loads of Honda products and enjoyed them, I’ve never had custody of one for more than a week at a time, so the offer of a test car for six months was most welcome.
The Jazz comes in four derivatives — 1,4-litre 61 kW “cooking” versions with five-speed manual or continuously variable auto transmissions and a lively 1,5-litre V-Tec that puts 81kW under the driver’s foot, along with sportier body bits to advertise that this isn’t the powder-puff version. This, in its manual guise, was the car sent to the Mail & Guardian for evaluation.
The Honda arrived, as one would expect, squeaky clean, with just 107km on the odometer. First impressions are important, so during the 35km drive from Gateway to Pinetown I muttered a few notes into the digital recorder I carry about for such purposes.
The 1,5-litre engine feels like a buzzy little unit, but at 120km/h it’s turning over at just more than 3Â 500rpm, which means that you’d be doing over 210km/h before you hit the rev limiter at 6Â 500rpm in fifth. True top speed as tested by those with the wherewithal to do so is 188kph, so the car is slightly overgeared, which is good for relaxed cruising and miserly fuel consumption.
The little car is no slouch off the line either, with the 0-100km/h sprint taking up well under 11s of your precious time. I expected the engine to be peaky, thanks to the V-Tec variable valve timing, but this proved not to be the case. Up a long hill on the freeway to Pinetown I let the car slow down to 110kph in top gear and then attacked the gas pedal with my right hoof. The car responded well, with the surge increasing, but not dramatically, as the rev counter eased past the 3Â 500rpm mark.
The air con is very efficient — oh, joy, in Durban’s summer — and the steering is very responsive to driver input. The seats are sporty yet comfortable and there’s a surprising amount of passenger space in the little Honda.
The Honda has been absolutely glitch-free so far. It took 500ml of oil after the initial 782km, but hasn’t used a drop in the 2Â 138km it has covered since. Economy has been good, with fuel consumption averaging 8,84 litres/100km of mainly city driving.
There hasn’t been a hint of a rattle or squeak and the only suggestion I could make to Honda on improving the feeling of quality would be to load a kilogram of lead ballast into each door to get them to close with a satisfactory “thunk” rather than the tinny noise the doors currently emit.
The facts
Model: Honda Jazz V-Tec
Price: R152 200
Engine: 1,5-litre petrol
Tech: 81kW, 143Nm
Top speed: 175km/h
Tank: 42 litres
Services: 15 000km
Odo at start: 107km
Odo now: 2 920km
Average fuel consumption: 8,8l/100km