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Photo: car.design.trends / Instagram
The Japanese automaker Honda is well known for its reliability and safety – it has numerous cars and SUVs in the top automobiles most likely to reach a quarter of a million miles, and just recently it also became the first automaker that earned a five-star FIA safety rating.
If you look at models like the Honda Accord Hybrid, HR-V, Civic, Pilot, or Ridgeline, they are among the few automobiles that have big chances to reach 250k miles during their lifetime, all thanks to Honda’s legendary reliability track. The FIA Road Safety Index for products and services has also included Honda for the first time with a five-star rating – a grade no other automaker has.
The FIA Road Safety Index is more like a governance audit, rather than a classic crash test scorecard from NHTSA or the IIHS and NCAP. Instead, it reports on the overall safety across the business, rather than at the end product. Anyway, we digress. For all its love in the reliability and safety department, Honda isn’t known for the most popular designs around the world, instead.
All those models we talked about are less than exciting to many people; there’s no doubt about it. No worries, though, as there are solutions – including from the rumor mill and the members of the imaginative guild of digital car content creators dwelling across the parallel universes of vehicular CGI. For example, the good folks over at “car.design.trends” have recently focused our attention on a hypothetical proposal for a brand-new Honda Civic done by Gaetano De Cicco, an Italian transportation and concept designer known as ‘0395_design’ on social media.
His most recent unofficial, hypothetical design project focuses on the eternal Honda Civic in hatchback format, a model that has been around since the very beginning of the nameplate in 1972 – more precisely, the three-door hatchback version. The virtual artist says this is a personal project, aimed at bringing back the Honda Civic Hatchback design style from the 1990s with a modern and minimalistic aesthetic.
The approach is pretty simple: one can recognize the round fifth-generation hatchback style, but now the Civic is long and wide, and also lower to the ground – the concept has big metal surfaces and small glass areas. There are narrow LED headlights at the front mixed with matching slim taillights, and there’s even an F1-style third brake light embedded in the bumper which forms the ‘H’ letter from LED dots.
Sporty elements include the big roof spoiler around the back and the large black alloy wheels, but otherwise it’s pretty much streamlined for high velocity. By the way, the pixel master doesn’t explicitly mention a powertrain, and the enclosed front suggests an EV treatment. However, we suspect it’s still ICE because there’s clear VTEC labeling at the front and on the sides, plus slim exhaust ports embedded in the rear diffuser.