CITY, SLICKER

摘要

A sports car does not provide the quickest way through a city. Just ask the Porsche or Ferrari owner, helplessly stuck at a T-junction waiting for a courteous flash of lights and a gap to filter into, as the hands of their Tag Heuer tick excruciatingly towards their Very Important Meeting. Nope, the quickest way through a city - on four wheels, at least - is smaller. And much more charming. Think of the all-time great town cars - Cinquecento, Mini, Mkl Twingo - and they've all got two things in common: dinky dimensions and doe eyes. Honda's been wise to follow the recipe with its new electric car, the irksomely lower case e. That's the only annoyance that gets within the same area code of one of these, however. It triumphed in our EV comparison test despite trailing its rivals on nearly every line of the spec sheet. A sense of humour is harder to quantify, but substantially more valuable in this corner of the car world. We find ourselves in achingly trendy east London to prove that Honda didn't just stick a picture of a modern Fiat 500 on the wall and tell its designers to follow suit. The Japanese company has form, which has just pulled up on the outskirts of Olympic Park with a grinning Yorkshireman behind the wheel. Richard Reeve has driven his beloved 1985 Honda City Turbo II over 200 miles - on a 36°C day, with the aircon only functioning in tandem with the heater - and he's still smiling. If that doesn't scream 'sense of humour', I'm not sure what does. His pumped up hatchback may look teensy enough to fall into kei car regulations, but it's not, instead following a design idiom brilliantly known as 'tallboy', which ensures it seats four adults with surprising ease. Standard Citys used a 1.2-litre engine with around 70bhp, the Turbo upping that by 50 per cent (you can guess by which means), producing a smidge under HObhp in the second-gen guise we have here. It boasts a slightly skunkworks feel, too, being a pet project of Hirotoshi Honda, one-time Mugen boss and the son of company founder Soichiro Honda. He impressed his dad enough that it was fast-tracked to production as the very first turbocharged Honda.