Needless to say, the Civic’s been flying off the showroom floor since its launch. What’s been surprising, even for Honda themselves, is the fact that sales of the automatic have far outpaced those of its manual brethren – surprising especially since India isn’t famous for its affinity towards automatic transmissions. Clearly the main reason for this change of heart is the Autos’ party piece – the S mode, which allows the driver to shift up and down through the gears via steering mounted paddles.

To give you some background regarding paddle shifts. In 1989, Ferrari developed a semi-automatic paddle-shift gearbox for its Formula 1 car, not with the intention to increase driver enjoyment or to pamper their highly paid racing drivers, but with the aim of reducing shift times and, therefore, all-important overall lap times.

If reducing lap times were the main objective in F1, is there any place for paddle shift gearboxes in road cars?

An obvious advantage of the paddle shift automatic is that it allows the driver to keep both hands on the wheel at all times, therefore theoretically providing more control. A flick of the paddle on the left for a downshift and a flick on the right for an upshift – all without having to remove your hands from the wheel. On the other hand, the manual on the Civic is one of the slickest in the business with its direct shifts and short throws.

The Civic – first impressions

The Honda Civic is clearly a very capable machine. The driving experience immediately reflects its state of the art technology and years of R&D – right from its stiff chassis that changes direction without hesitation to its surprisingly comfortable ride.

With that said, one of the inherent downsides of Honda’s fantastic VTEC technology is that it creates maximum power high in the rev range. The upside of course is that this encourages the driver to explore the upper limits of that rev range on a regular basis, which in itself is quite enjoyable. Unfortunately, extended driving at 6500 RPM is not something that would endear fellow road users – or even environmentalists for that matter, as any engine, even one as efficient as the Civics’, has an unquenchable thirst for liquefied fossil fuel at high RPM.

Unfortunately, the 132bhp created by the Civics’ 1.8 litre engine just isn’t enough – it especially lacks low-end torque. Whereas the manual transmission is able to work around this problem by offering short and direct shifts that make it a pleasure to use, the automatic transmission, even in S or paddle shift mode, highlights this lack of torque and can feel underpowered – this is despite the fact that smooth up-shifts can be made without lifting your foot off the accelerator pedal.