Did this new hybrid family crossover really outshine the Qashqai? Here’s our verdict
JAMES ATTWOOD
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WHY WE RAN IT
To find out if Honda’s new SUV can take on the Nissan Qashqai while maintaining the charms of the Civic it’s based on
There’s a Honda ZR-V-sized gap outside my house, and only now it has left me do I realise quite how much I appreciated it. It turns out I liked the ZR-V a lot more than I thought I would.
That might come across as a backhanded compliment, but I mean no offence. It’s just that the ZR-V was quite hard to get excited about, as a sensible family crossover conceived simply to fill a Nissan Qashqai-sized hole in the Honda line-up.
It felt like a car designed after many focus groups to appeal to the widest possible market, with anything that would possibly be contentious struck from the design. So I was expecting vanilla ice cream. What I found was… well, vanilla ice cream. But sometimes you can’t beat a good scoop of that.
While I could feel the Qashqai’s influence in almost every aspect, the ZR-V never felt like a box-ticking clone – and the list of things that it quietly did well is surprisingly long.
It looked good, for one thing, and it was well sized: large enough to make for ideal family transport and with a thoroughly decent boot yet compact enough that I could drive it anywhere I wanted and not feel nervous in older car parks.
The interior of our range-topping Advance car was comfortable and classy, with enveloping leather seats and plenty of leg room, and the big windows and panoramic sunroof let in plenty of light. The Bose sound system was great and the dashboard had a real quality feel to it.
However, other elements of the interior were less convincing, particularly the touchscreen, which wasn’t particularly big or crisp. Added to that, Honda’s infotainment software and sat-nav were a little clunky and unclear to use. But I can forgive that a bit, because it had physical buttons (albeit slightly cheap-feeling ones) to access the home page and to go back a page, while a useful row of key controls were fixed across the bottom of the touchscreen – and below them a series of chunky and well-weighted ventilation controls. None of that is a given any more.
When it came to driving, the ZR-V proved itself one of the best in its class. It rode nicely and steered well, while the complicated-to-explain 181bhp hybrid powertrain (which centred on a
