On the road: Honda CR-V – car review
Nobody chooses to be a person who makes up slogans for cars: you have to try not to get too hung up on them. But Honda's "the power of dreams" infuriated me as I drove the CR-V. It swam around my head. "Nobody would ever dream this!" I shouted as the stertorous automatic gear change dragged me clumsily along. "Not unless they'd eaten blue cheese and gone to sleep thinking about Talgarth Road." The new nine-speed automatic transmission has made it smoother than the five-speed, but I still found it lurchy and lumbering.
These cars are incredibly popular, dominating the compact SUV market, the bestselling in the world last year. Since the appeal of the SUV is largely to show off how much space you can take up using only your wallet and your bullheadedness, I don't really understand the market for the compact version: people are weird, was my take-home. The City-Brake Active System is the big safety feature: a windscreen-mounted laser radar that detects a likely collision at speeds of less than 18mph and brakes if you don't. So, if you're in traffic of more than one lane, which you often are in town, it emits a constant high-pitched noise. It's needlessly stressful. From what I know of driving, you always would brake, unless you were asleep: they might as well have designed a seat-mounted sleeping-driver detector with a sprinkler system.
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